Cottoncrow's cry – Chapter twelve
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Bomieth saw the panic that filled the dwarf's eyes and, understanding that the elf's condition was serious, quickly called two guards to help. Between them, Legolas was rushed to the nearest house.
The house's owner, a small man with a balding head, came to door at Bomieth's calling, but he seemed none too happy with what was being asked of him.
Today had been marked by all as the day that they would finally be able to breathe easier, free from the menace that had haunted them for so long. And Bomieth, smitten by some reason that none could venture to guess, had pushed that relief away.
For the past times, the man had been barely brave enough to step out in the street, afraid to be touched by the Bruisenbite. With his own well and growth of greens, he had little need of venturing outside but, when ever forced to, he would go about his business as fast as he could, trying to barely breath the very air that circled him.
Be it chance or a result of his care, the killer disease had yet to affect those in his house and for that the man was greatly thankful.
The events that had taken place in the central square had run from mouth to mouth all across Cottoncrow, reaching his ears as well, for he had been too afraid to join such a large crowd. From what he had heard, little sense could be made out of it. The only thing that he could be sure of was that the disease was a reality and that no amount of fairy tale, or elf tale for that matter, was going to make it disappear.
And now, Bomieth was at his door, with the elf in tow, demanding entrance. He could hardly deny such request, but it was with a heavy heart that he did so. His wife, standing behind him, covered her mouth in surprise, as she saw whom the guards were carrying in. She recovered quickly enough, directing the guards in to the house's other room, where a cot stood near the fire place. The look of annoyed disapproval that her husband send her was carefully ignored as she set about feeding the hearth and lighting the room with candles.
Yes, she realized that that was their cot, reason why her husband seemed so disturbed, but it was also the house's only cot, and the elf, evil or not, didn't look too good. Her conscience was still heavy with the knowledge that, although old, she and her husband had been both healthy and able to land a help when the rest of the town had need of it. But forbidden by her husband of setting foot outside, the woman had passed her days in despair, hearing tales of family and friends meeting their demise at the touch of the Bruisenbite and doing nothing.
A person used to work her entire life, she had been mother of five boys, three of which now full grown men and responsible for families of their own. The other two she had lost, one to disease when he was a baby, the other to Mother Nature, while fishing. Since that day, she had questioned many things that others took for granted, for what Mother could kill her own children?
So now, as she looked at the form that the guards placed over the fern cot, she did not see an elf, good or bad, she did not see the two headed creature that all believe him to be, nor did she see the answer to end their troubles. All she could see was a living being, hurt and suffering, and Bomieth, whom she trusted above all, asking for their aid.
Gimli stood aside, not wanting to stand in the way of those helping his friend, and yet, behaving like a spectator while the woman kneeled next to Legolas and cut his dark tunic away, was becoming the hardest thing that the dwarf had ever done.
He looked outside through the window next to him. Night had settled gently and the first stars were already lit in the dark sky. With a tired sigh, Gimli realized that the hour he had spent the entire day dreading for, had come and passed without him even noticing.
"He'll be need'n a healer," the old woman stated, forcing Gimli to, once more, look at the events unfolding near the fire place. She had left the elf's side only to fetch clean linens and water, since her husband refused to help her, and when she had cut away the rude bandage that had been wrapped around the stranger's waist, she couldn't avoid the gasp that escaped her mouth.
It was an ugly wound.
The flesh around the diamond shape cut was torn apart, bits of red tissue that should've been inside hanging from its opening in a grotesque way. Whoever had remove the arrow's tip hadn't surely been successful at first try, from lack of experience or lack of care, and when the weapon was finally pulled out, the damage had been impossible to control.
The woman shivered as she passed a water-soaked linen over the wound, cleaning cloth, blood and purulence away, imagining the amount of pain she was surely causing. She stole a glance to the elf's face, noticing the stressed lines on his forehead and the tense muscles on his neck. He looked so young… some of her grandchildren were older than him! Somehow, it didn't seem fair to her. She reached for the elf's hand, which was unconsciously grasping and twisting the cot beneath him, in compass with her ministrations.
Her blood covered hand covered his cold fingers and she sighed.
"He'll be need'n a proper healer soon… tis a wound that would be need'n more than me poor knowledges in such arts," she said.
The defeat in her voice felt like a slap in Gimli's face. He turned his head in denial, as if that action would turn the woman's words false. Surely there was something that could be done!
"Unless you have another healer in this place that I don't know of, that maggot of a human isn't coming near Legolas again… his done enough damage already!"
The dwarf's face was red with anger and yet, as he kneeled by the elf's side and grabbed his other hand, his motions were gentle and careful, as if touching his ailing friend would make him disappear.
"Be reasonable, master Gimli," Bomieth ventured, aware that it was not his place to interfere. "There is no one else."
"I'll stitch him myself, if need be!" Gimli exploded, turning loaded eyes towards the villager.
The woman in front of him cleaned her hands on a dry piece of cloth and looked the dwarf in the eyes. She could recognize the frustration, anger and fear in them, try as he might to hide those feelings. She could also see how much care and friendship ran between these two.
"The wound is festering," she told him quietly, hoping to call him back to reality. "I've seen many a men, strong men, dying from wounds lesser than tis. Not tended properly, I tell you, tis one will die too!"
"He's an elf, that he is" the woman's husband said, surprising all who hadn't heard a word from him yet. "We can't know if his kind dies of such things…"
Unconsciously all heads turned to Gimli, recognizing in him the only one with knowledge of elves. But on such matters, he knew little more than them.
He had heard the tales of elves dying of sadness and grief, Legolas had told him plenty of them on their journeys. And he had seen too many of them fall in battle, killed by Orcs and Uruk-hai. He knew that elven immortality only went so far, but never had he heard of a sick elf.
Gimli looked at his friend, wishing that he could provide him with an answer, but Legolas' eyes were closed now, locking him in a private world where he answered to no one.
"There is no one else? An apprentice? A healer from a near village? Anyone?" The dwarf whispered, feeling cornered in his choices.
None present in the small room had the heart to say it loud, but words were not needed. Gimli wasn't really expecting an answer. He knew Samuel was the only one and that he was too selfish to pass his knowledge to another, just as he knew that they were too far from everywhere for help to arrive in time.
The dwarf's head dropped to his chest in defeat, as he gave his silent consent.
"Fetch Samuel!" Bomieth ordered the two guards.
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Samuel was not happy.
All that he had hopped for, all that he had planned so carefully, all that he had achieved so far… gone! Useless! Pointless! Wasted!
He looked at his tied up hands, trying to understand what had failed. None, in its sane mind, would believe that he had killed Bomieth'son; there was no proof of such deed, except for that woman's word. His attempt to kill the old fool, now that was a different matter. It had gone terrible wrong. Ill time it had been, when those two women arrived, just as he was about to plunge the dwarf's axe in to Bomieth's chest.
His plan was flawless… No one was supposed to be there, all should've been at the elf's execution. That was as it should have come to pass, that was what he had foreseen. The two strangers, the execution, the dwarf's ill temper uncontained and Bomieth dead, with an axe in his chest.
Instead, the two women had come out of nowhere, screaming and calling him murderer even before he had a chance to finish the old man's existence. He had failed, but he was not defeated.
Now they had come, asking for his help. The elf was ill and, although they knew that he must have had something to do with that condition, they had still come to him. The elf was wasting away, and they were clueless on what to do about it. Their undeclared despair amused him to no end.
Samuel's first instinct was to spit on their pleas and laugh in their desperate faces. But instead, quickly realizing that such attitude would achieve him nothing, the healer swallowed his pride and showed his wiliness to help. Inside his head, a new plan was being forged.
When the guards arrived to fetch Samuel, no one took notice of the discreet look exchanged between the prisoner and one of his guardians.
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Gimli had barely moved from his spot since Samuel had arrived. He stood, watching the healer like a hawk, his recently retrieved axe ready at hand, eager to be used on Samuel's neck the minute he moved the wrong way.
"I would appreciate you not being so close when I'm treading with a needle," Samuel said with annoyance, his eyes focused of the thin piece of metal in his fingers, its tip still glowing amber from the flames it had come out. Like an artifice working on a shoe, he inserted the needle from one side to the other of the open wound, leaving a blood soaked string between the two small holes. With steady fingers, he would then pull the string tight, securing it with a knot. "It is extremely annoying to feel your breath on my neck," he said, placing the needle near the fire once more.
Gimli took extra care with his next breath, letting it out slowly and exclusively over the healer's neck.
"You haven't seen me being extremely annoying yet," he said, not bothering to hide the menace in his voice.
The fact that he had no other choice but to suffer the healer's presence in order to save Legolas' life, didn't meant that, by any means, this maggot was out of his to-squash list. The dwarf knew that, if the elf had a gapping hole in his side, then Samuel was surely involved in its making at some point. He could barely contain his anger as the man worked.
He had been counting the amount of threads the man already used to close Legolas' wound. Six so far, and although it was only half closed at that point, it had already started to lose most of its gruesome aspect.
The elf had squirmed and moaned until about the forth thread, becoming deadly still after that, a development that had left Gimli somewhere between grateful and worried like a mother hen. As much as it was a relief for him see the end of his friend' suffering, the dwarf couldn't convince himself that the quiet and pale being in front of him was still among the living.
'As long as you have a breathe to complain about it, it hasn't killed you yet', his father used to say, and Gimli soon discovered that holding his friend's wrist and feeling the steady beat beneath his fingertips did wonders to calm his nerves.
The sturdy dwarf cleaned the sweat dripping from his forehead and looked longingly at the closed window. The air inside the small room was as hot as Mordor's furnaces, laden with the smell of burned wood and blood.
Samuel picked another thread, looped it inside the needle and passed it through the wound, catching the dwarf's hungry eyes towards fresh air.
"You can open it, if you will," he said matter-of-factly, "or do you fear I might leap from my spot and escape through it before you notice?" He teased, pulling the thread and tying another knot.
Gimli snarled, puffing his chest full of air. The thought that Samuel might have used that window to escape had indeed crossed his mind, but never would he have a chance to do that, not while Gimli of the Three Hunters was watching him.
His knees popped like bottle's corks when he stood up, making faces that Samuel could not see at the painful needles that prickled his legs after being so long in the same position.
'You are getting old' Gimli admitted to himself as he neared the window and opened it ajar, feasting in the cold, clean air that assaulted his nostrils.
"I will need the Arnica's leaves now," Samuel said, leaning his bent legs back until they were supported by his heels, looking patiently at the dwarf as he cleaned his bloody hands on a over used piece of cloth. "The wound is closed but I will need to apply the Arnica's paste before wrapping it."
"And you've already been told that you can't go get it by yourself!" Gimli angrily answered, repeating the same lines of their initial discussion.
When he had arrived, Samuel had taken one look at the wound and declared that he could do nothing if didn't had a specific kind of plant to treat the already present infection. A specific plant, a rare plant, that unlike most he used, had to be applied shortly after being collected.
The healer had offered to go in to forest to do the picking himself, but all had seen that offer as a mean for his escape and he had been ordered to treat the elf without further discussions. Now the matter had arisen again.
"Then you have a problem, master dwarf," Samuel calmly said, "because without that plant, I can't guarantee you that the elf won't die all the same."
It truly was a point that matter as little to Samuel as his voice made it sound. Weather the elf lived or died, his own fate was sealed and saving the elf wouldn't necessarily mean that he would save himself.
"And tell me again why there aren't any of these blasted greens in your storage?" Gimli asked with sarcasm, not having believed a single word of the longish explanation that the healer had given before. He clearly remembered seeing large cabinets in Samuel's house, and what sort of healer would not keep the trinkets of his trade close to hand?
The look that Samuel had fixed upon the dwarf was something worth of keeping in the weapons' room.
"As I told you before, the Arnica's leaf is only of use for a short period of time after being collected… and impossible to grow," Samuel added hastily, seeing that Gimli was ready to cut across his words.
Gimli's gaze searched the healer's face, looking for the slightest proof that this was some sort of trick to fool him, but the man's features only spoke of treachery and betrayal. He had little chance of guessing to which point exactly those features were referring to. And he had little options, again.
"Very well, snake, tell me how this cursed weed looks like and I shall see that someone fetches it for you!"
Inside, Samuel smiled. He knew that, eventually, the dwarf would give in. The life of his precious friend dwarfed his senses and reasoning. And for that reason alone, Samuel was certain that the dwarf would never leave the search of such a vital thing in the hands of a stranger. No… the dwarf would go himself.
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The mumbled words that hadn't stopped coming out from Gimli's mouth since he'd left the village, would've put a blush in the trees that surrounded them now, had trees had ears to hear them and cheeks to turn red.
'A small, bulbous white plant, with blade-shaped leaves and a sweetly smell'
Samuel's words rang like a bell in a large cave, inside Gimli's head, as his eyes darted left and right, looking for anything that might be remotely similar to it. What chances did they have of finding such a small and hard to spot thing in a forest that big, in the middle of the night?
Gimli felt like a fool, chasing a fool's errant.
But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that the truly foolish thing, the one action that he would never forgive himself, was to do nothing, to not defy chance and believe that yes, they would indeed find such a tiny thing in the middle of the forest with barely no light to guide them.
Truth was that he had never seen the elf looking like that. He had been hurt before, but never like that. And that scared Gimli more than anything else, because Legolas was the immortal one, the one that would remain alive to tell their tale until the end of times. If anyone should die, that would've be him, a dwarf that by no terms was old, but that had already seen much and lived a full life.
So, Gimli decided to his own buttons, yes, he would've searched for a needle in a hay stack, if that was asked of him to do to get the elf back on his feet.
He just hated the fact that it was Samuel doing the asking.
"Found any?" He called out to the four guards that reluntely accompanied him.
Behind him, Gimli could see four dots of flickering flames, answering him with four different voices, all empty of good news. Ahead, at the edge of his torch's light, he could see that the trees gave way to a large patch of land, filled with bushes. Maybe their luck would change soon.
Gimli's mood, however, would not change. He felt that something was wrong, but exactly what it was, he could not tell. The healer's fortitude, his nonchalant behavior, his lack of resistance about losing such a good chance of escaping, his insistence in staying with Legolas, saying he didn't wanted to waste all the work he had had…
The dwarf felt that he was being manipulated all over again, but without another healer nearby to safely call Samuel a liar; could he really risk not fulfilling that manipulation?
A new string of curses left his mouth as they reached the turf of land and spread to search more carefully amidst the low vegetation.
He swore, if he had to stare at yet another patch of ferns, he would…
"Here! I found it!" One of the guards yelled, happy with the thought that he might still spend a part of this night in his warm bed. "There's a whole bundle of them weeds in here!"
Following Samuel's instructions on how to collect the plant, Gimli hurried back to the village, carrying the little white leaves as if mithril threads they were.
The torches that had lit Cottoncrow earlier that evening had, for most part, died out, leaving entire streets plundered in darkness. The smell of burned wood and oil still lingered in the air like an invisible ghost, waiting for the first rays of the sun to be chased away.
Though the hour was late, many was still outside or standing by their opened windows. None could sleep that night.
A peculiar change had occurred without any particular possible explanation.
Most had by now understood that, believing in the resolution of all of their problems with the elf's death had been a foolish, even shameful thing to do. The possibility that the dwarf had spoken the truth about the well's water had slowly wormed its way in to their heads, helped by Bomieth's reassurances that he believed the stranger's word. The sight of Samuel tied up and surrounded by guards and the hammering of nails has the well's mouth was closed earlier in the evening had secured the idea that maybe, just maybe, they might have a chance to survive.
The one thing that no one could truly explain, however, was the general feeling that swapped them all: the feeling that their survival was, somehow, connected with the elf's survival. Like small children, placing bets on which way the wind would turn, or if a bird would land or not, and letting those bets decide if they would do their chores or not, most villagers had now their lives hanging from such game of chance.
No longer was it the death of the elf that would save them, it was his survival that would reassure them that all would be well, that they would have a chance to fight and have a life after all this darkness. If he, who was immortal, could not defeat the body's weakness, how could they aspire to do the same? If that stranger that had, after all, done them no wrong, met his death because of them, how could they, that had done nothing to stop the wrong that had been done to him, aspire to be spared?
Each time that news of one more villager getting touched by the Bruisenbite was whispered in that night, it was like a herald of their doom, and those waiting felt without knowing why that if the elf's passing was the next news they heard, then all of their hopes were forfeit.
Gimli wasted no time with manners or courtesy has he ran pass the guards posted outside the house where he had left Legolas. He barely even saw Bomieth and Alumna seating by the table near the room's door, talking in quiet tones. He made straight for the room, his hand closing around the door handle unconsciously. As he opened it, a thread of clairvoyance, or as close as he would ever be of such things, flashed before him. And Gimli knew it before his eyes could confirm the reality of his 'vision'…
The room was empty.
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Again, sorry for the huge amount of time between updates bows humbly but, as my degree is finally done :D I'll be having a lot more time to dedicate to writing. The story is almost over, and a major re-editing of it is already planned, but only after I get to write those sweet words 'THE END'
I can never say enough THANK YOU! THANK YOU! For all the wonderful reviews I've beenreceiving. You guys light my day :D !
Please, keep on reviewing!