Thanks to everyone who reviewed my last chapter! I would respond to each, but I am in such a rush to get this out, all I will say is that all questions raised in these chapters will be answered and there is lots of Aragorn angst to come. I hope you enjoy this chapter. I will try to get the next one out as soon as possible, but I can't promise I'll be able to keep churning them out this fast. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or places in this story that are the property of J. R. R. Tolkien. I just love them. I do own a few of the characters that appear in this story, however.
Medical Disclaimer: no treatment or diagnosis is described within this text. All injuries, sicknesses and cures are the product of my imagination or what best fits the story.
"…the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath…" Shakespeare, Macbeth Act II, scene ii, lines 35-37
"Well," Tithen said as she rose from her knees. "That just about finishes that bit. Except for your head, and those wounds on your chest and arm, I've patched you up just about as best as I can. You know,"she said with a grin, "You had better survive this. I shall be very angry if I used all that suture for nothing." She tossed another bloodied rag into the corner that had been become the makeshift clothes hamper. There was already a large pile of bloody clothes, towels, and some of her own outer garments that had gotten too dirty for her to feel comfortable wearing while healing.
It had taken the better part of an hour, but Tithen had finally managed to bandage the wounds on his legs and help him into clean breeches. She had wrapped blankets around him and changed hot water twice. After changing the dirty, bloodied water for the second time, she had slipped fire heated, smooth stones in between the sheets of the bed to warm them, in preparation for Estel, as he had become firmly named in her mind. She had also written a note to herself on a slip of paper and pinned it to her undershirt to not let him up for at least a week. One of his knees was badly bruised and sprained ( it looked as though someone had tried to smash it will a club), and he looked as though he had walked through several patches of long thorned bushes at various times in the past weeks.
As night had deepened, the room had become progressively darker. Tithen lit more of the lamps lining the walls and brought in two more candelabras to better light the bed. She sighed pensively. The man was weak. He had lost a lot of blood, and if his knee was any indication of what the rest of him looked like under what was left of the blood soaked tunics, he very probably had internal injuries she couldn't see. She could feel a fever starting to rise within him, which was only to be expected, but still worrisome.
ovovovovovo
Aragorn had let his eyes close and himself relax. Tithen was skilled, and he was thankful that she was. She knew exactly how to treat bruises and bind wounds with the least amount of pain he could have hoped for. He was used to pain, he had to be, since he often had to stitch up his own wounds, but it was nonetheless nice to not suffer—he was, after all, human. He had admired the way she had sutured the deeper cuts. Her stitches were quick, small and even, and she had used what he believed to be a tightly packed snowball to numb the surronding flesh.
Aragorn had not been able to open his eyes for very long, and when he did, his vision was so clouded that he was unable to see his host very well. So, to distract himself, he had tried to build a picture of her in his mind. He already knew she was fairly tall, perhaps a few inches shorter than he, and that she was very strong. He did not need to see the pots she had brought in to know that they were heavy. He had listened to her voice. It was soft, maternal, and sounded like the waves brushing against the shore; it flowed and ebbed rhythmically, as though her songs had the power to rock him gently on their tide like a boat in a harbor. Her hands were powerful, her fingers were long, but not thin—they were calloused, workers hands, with the delicate skill of the musicien- like the fiddler. Tithen's hands, Aragorn concluded, had the equal power to lay stone and knead bread as they did brush like butterflies over bruises and precisely stitch a wound.
Suddenly, Aragorn was startled out of his reverie by the sudden presence of a mug of cool water at his lips. He was for a moment torn between the burning desire to slake his thirst and sooth his burning throat, and the instinctive repulsion, based on his previous experience with drinking that day.
"It's alright, The medicine I gave you earlier will be working now. Just take a sip, drink slowly, that's it," Tithen whispered coaxingly. Aragorn obeyed, and was pleasantly surprised that after an initial wave of nausea, his stomach settled and placidly accepted the water. "Don't gulp. Just drink it slowly."
The mug was withdrawn from his lips and without the soothing water to ease his throat he began to cough. Immediately, a new mug was offered, this one full of a warm, sweet, creamy drink. He opened his eyes in surprise and cast her a questioning glance. She smiled and held it for him to drink more. "Warm milk and honey. It's better than any herbs I've yet discovered for a sore throat and a cough. Well, actually, I can't claim the credit. My mother taught me how to make this."
All too soon, so far as Aragorn was concerned, this drink too was withdrawn and replaced with another, this time a broth. This was not so appetizing as the water, and Aragorn was thankful that she didn't urge him to drink more than a few mouthfuls of it.
Aragorn once more relaxed into the cocoon of warm blankets and pillows that he had been enveloped in. He so wanted to sleep. He felt Tithen take hold of some of his hair and start to work out most of the dried mud with a damp cloth.
"Go to sleep now, my friend. I will wake you again, I promise you- probably before you would like. Try to get some rest."
Aragorn was grateful. He had fought the weariness that seemed to hang like lead upon him. He let himself drift into a painless, dreamless sleep, as Tithen sang soft lullabies.
"Take
the wave now and know that you're free
Turn
your back on the land, face the sea.
Face
the wind now, so wild and so strong.
When
you think of me, wave to me and send me a song.
Don't
look back when you reach the new shore,
Don't
forget what you're leaving me for
Don't
forget when you're missing me so
Love
must never hold, never hold tight but let go…
Aragorn relaxed in the warmth and peace of sleep. He was drifting into the welcoming darkness that promised rest and escape.
ovovovovovo
Tithen heard Estel's breathing become slow and even. She had managed to clean most of the dry dirt from his hair in the interim, enough to find a cut on his forehead (previously hidden behind plastered-on hair). She reached out and placed her right hand across his forehead and let herself slide…
Tithen could see him, drifting in the darkness. She knew this place well, the realm of the spirit, of the conciousness, and every plane of it, from the brightest, daydream, to the darkest, death. They were all degrees of the same peaceful escape of the mind from the trials of the physical house of their bodies. Sleep was but death's counterfeit, and she knew both of them well. She was one of the few people now on Middle Earth who could tread here and know it, map it out, dwell consciously both in her body, and in this world. It was how she had earned her name.
She reached out, and held him, guided him to a place that was dark enough, deep enough that he would not feel the pain of her cleaning his wounds, but still light enough that she could wake him easily in need.
Aragorn could see her as well. He saw her as glowing with a gentle light, shimmering in the darkness. He felt her arm wrap around him and hold him.
"Stay here, my friend. Do not wander, do not stray farther than this."
He nodded. Even his spirit was too weary to speak.
Tithen started to withdraw her arm, but decided to continue to hold him. He was weary, in body and spirit, and the darkness might call to him, just as it had…
She saw herself place an arm around him and anchor him were she needed him to be. She knew she could withdraw and tend his wounds while holding him firmly in the darkness, if only for a short while before she would be torn between the two worlds.
She opened her eyes and withdrew her hand. She paused for a moment looking at Estel, and then quickly turned down the bed, and took out the stones that by this time had warmed the bed considerably. She spread towels over the top half of the bed to catch any water, or blood, that might otherwise spoil the sheets. Carefully easing off the layers of blankets off Estel, she threw some over the footboard of the bed and others onto the laundry pile to be washed. Carefully, gently, she slid her arms beneath his shoulders and knees and lifted him. He presented no particular challenge to her strength—even a fully grown man was a small thing compared to a bale of hay or a struggling calf—but she was nonetheless shocked and disturbed by his lack of weight—he should have weighed a good deal more for a man his size.
She carefully lowered him on to the bed and pulled the many blankets up to his waist. Then Tithen straightened up and took a deep breath, steeling herself for what she might uncover beneath the sanguine rags on Estel.
Using a small pair of scissors, Tithen carefully cut through the tunics, going around the areas that had been plastered to his skin with dry blood. Soon, there was little left of what appeared to be three tunics. Scraps lay in a pile at her feet, and there were two large patches of fabric still clinging to Aragorn—one on his right side, and another on his upper left arm. There were also threads of a sleeve snaking out from beneath his left wrist guard. Tithen suspected that he had broken his arm, and that the stiff wrist guard was acting as a temporary splint, and so had left it to deal with last.
Tithen took a small towel and soaked it in the warm water, then folded it into a pad and held it over the stiff fabric on his chest. The water would loosen the dried blood and let her remove the last scraps of tunic without breaking the scab and starting a fresh flow of blood. She waited a few minutes, and then tried to lift a corner. Part of it came away with little trouble, but the deepest layers were still stiff. She reapplied the wet cloth and waited again.
This time the patches came off with relative ease, leaving behind a red jelly in a pit in the flesh of Aragorn. Tithen bit her lip. The wound was deep, and no matter how many times she had peeled rewetted clothes off deep wounds, she had never lost the sensation of instantaneous repulsion and horror of seeing them. Gently, carefully, so as to start not a fresh flow of blood, she took a fresh cloth, dampened it and began to clean the wound, using as little pressure and force as she could. Little by little, she cleaned the congealed blood and dirt from the wound. Using a pair of fine tweezers, she began the delicate process of easing loose threads, grit, and tiny bone shards from the lesion. When she was done, she could see that the sword (or whatever weapon had hit him) had struck partway into at least one of Estel's ribs. The bone had broken about half way through, and had been the source of the bone shards. She thanked the Valar that the ribs had not broken all the way through—it that had been the case, she would have had to worry about punctured lungs, and her patient drowning in his own blood.
Keeping in mind how luck they both were, Tithen washed the blood off her hands and began to pull jars of ointment and vials of antiseptic, and poison antidotes, out of her healers bag, and line them up beside piles of pads and bandages. Taking one of the smaller pads and holding it slightly below the wound, she uncorked several jars of antiseptic and began to dribble small amounts of each into the opening.
She could feel Aragorn struggling, trying to either reach consciousness and stop the pain, or retreat deeper into unconsciousness. She cursed herself for not bracing him for the sudden agony the antiseptics invariably caused.
"Stop that!" she shouted at him. He stopped struggling briefly to cast suspicious glance at her before once again struggling to reach the light. She held on to him as well as she could, but she was divided, and her strength was neither fully here, nor there.
She pulled more of herself into the darkness to hold him there, but she knew that she needed to keep most of herself in the physical world, to heal him. Time was running out.
Tithen started to chant—she did not know what language it was, but she continued her singsong chant, hoping it would help, or do something. She did not even know what she was chanting, or why. She just hoped that it would help. She knew she could not remain like this for long; she could neither continue to heal, nor could she detach herself and reassure Estel that everything was all right. She felt herself being torn between reality and the world of spirits and shadows.
TBC
A/N Hehe, a cliff hanger! I wont leave you too long with it. Although perhaps an evil cliffhanger will be enough incentive for you readers who read and then don't leave a review to start reviewing! The more reviews I get, the faster I write!