Taming The Beast. Heather Grothaus

deep set and wintry, his mouth hard and nearly invisible. He walked quickly, the hands swinging at his side looking as though they had been stolen from a Saracen—stained a deep, deep brown, his fingernails in black relief.

      A squealing fear raced up Roderick’s spine at the surgeon’s approach, and he prayed with everything left of his soul that he would die before the learned old man reached him. He’d never imagined fear like this, and it caused Roderick to scream and thrash and beg for reprieve inside his broken shell of a body.

      But outside, that shell did not so much as twitch.

      “What is it?” the surgeon asked of Hugh, reaching out his nightmarish hands and speaking even before coming at once over the pallet. Hard fingers probed either side of Roderick’s forehead, roughly turning the splintered skull in a starburst of fresh agony. “Head wound, yes?” Hands with the strength of Goliath pressed his shattered right arm. “And arm, I see. Both stitched as well as can be. Fever, yes?”

      Hugh seemed to at last regain his voice at the brusque questions and statements, given with little apparent sympathy. “Yes, yes, maestro. Fever, yes. The stitches seem to be holding well, but his fever has steadily worsened since Heraclea. I think perhaps it is his leg—”

      Before Hugh could finish, the old man swept down upon Roderick’s left leg and jerked up the stained covering. Roderick fancied he could smell his own wound on the breeze the surgeon created, although his nose had been too swollen to take air in more than a fortnight.

      Hugh stepped toward Roderick’s feet and continued. “Perhaps the lance which pierced him was tainted with p—”

      “Poison, yes,” the surgeon interrupted. “And through the thickness of his calf, no less. I’ve seen it often enough. Nasty trick.” The surgeon dropped the blanket back over Roderick’s leg and flicked his fingertips to the lads hovering behind him, indicating the boys should move on. They trudged past Roderick’s pallet without a glance.

      The old man looked at Hugh. “He’ll die.” Then the surgeon stepped directly into Roderick’s line of sight, putting angular cheekbones before his face. “Awake, yes? Good. You’re going to die, my man,” he nearly shouted, as if he knew Roderick’s hearing was not in its finest capacity. “Do you understand?”

      Roderick wanted to nod and thought his chin may have twitched downward. He was so thankful that the man would not be touching him with those black fingers. He let his eye close.

      “No!” Hugh shouted. Roderick didn’t want to open his eye again, but the sounds of a scuffle prompted a distant concern for his friend. Hugh appeared again in the narrow slit of Roderick’s vision, having seized the surgeon by one arm. “No, he can not die. There must be something you can do.”

      The old man pulled his arm free with a cold look of warning. “The poison’s been in him too long. Had I been at his side when he fell, perhaps. But now, any potion would be wasted on him—like pouring it upon the ground, and we have not enough as it is. He’ll be cold by the morrow’s light. I am sorry. Good day.”

      “No!” Hugh shouted again, and this time nearly pulled the surgeon off his feet. “You must try to understand—he saved my life. Anything you can do—”

      “Good sir, you see the men lying about this chamber, yes?” the surgeon demanded. “Think you their lives are worth less than this man’s?”

      “Yes,” Hugh answered immediately. “Yes, I do.”

      “Well, I do not,” the surgeon shouted, and Roderick silently agreed with him. The surgeon turned to go, but Hugh grabbed at the man’s hand once more, this time falling to his knees behind him.

      “Please, maestro, please! I beg of you.” At the reedy catch in Hugh Gilbert’s voice and the sight of him pressing his lips to the surgeon’s bloodstained hand, Roderick let his eye close once more. He could not bear to see the man plead for a cause so hopeless and unworthy.

      “Do you not think I would save him if I could?” Roderick heard the surgeon say in a quieter, slightly gentler voice.

      “Please,” was Hugh’s only reply.

      Roderick heard a curt sigh, and then, “Boy!” After the pattering of quick footsteps and a rustle-clink: “This will ease his pain. It’s all I can spare, I’m afraid. Small dose at first, yes? Only from the fingertip, lest you wish to show him mercy and kill him outright. He may stay until he’s dead, and then he must be moved. I need the pallet.”

      The surgeon’s steps fled impatiently from Hugh’s “God bless you, maestro. Thank you, thank you!”

      In the next moment, Hugh’s breath huffed a cool, hammering breeze on Roderick’s fevered and throbbing face, and Roderick heard the pip of a small cork. “Here we are, Rick—what I had hoped for. Open up now.” He felt Hugh’s rough finger push inside his lips to scrub at his gums. A tingling warmth filled his mouth and then Hugh’s finger returned. And again.

      Was his friend trying to kill him? Roderick opened his eye as best he could while his head started a slow, buzzing spin.

      Hugh’s face swam before him, milky and pebbled with sweat, as he tried to fit the stopper back in the small, colored glass bottle with fumbling fingers. “Come on, come on, for fuck’s sake!” The cork at last slid home and Hugh slipped the vial away inside his tunic.

      “Hugh?” Roderick tried to whisper, but he heard only a gurgling “oo” blurt from his lips. It was enough to get his friend’s attention.

      “It’s a lot, I know,” Hugh rushed as he reached over Roderick, gathering together into a rough sack their few belongings scattered on either side of Roderick’s pallet. “But you need it—we’re getting out of here, Rick. I’m taking you to—”

      “Oh,” Roderick choked.

      “Yes.” Hugh stood and disappeared from Roderick’s line of sight, but his words were still painfully clear as Roderick felt the rough blanket he rested on lift his head and shoulders. “Try to sleep,” Hugh said with a whoosh of effort. “It will—”

      But the rest of his friend’s statement was lost to Roderick as Hugh jerked on the blanket and began pulling it like a makeshift gurney. Roderick’s body started, and the white pain that exploded from the rough movement, combined with the sizzling, dazzling substance Hugh had slipped into Roderick’s mouth ensured that he did, indeed, sleep.

      Roderick didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious, or how far Hugh had dragged him, but he didn’t think it had been very long or very far, for the acrid taste of the hospital’s incense was still thick and gritty in his mouth. He heard the voices before he could try to open his remaining functioning eye, which refused to cooperate at that moment, any matter. As it was, whatever drug Hugh had given to Roderick was affecting his already-disadvantaged hearing, distorting the voices and, in spots, blanking them out altogether.

      He felt no pain—indeed, he was largely numb, save for the uncontrollable trembling which had seized him. Perhaps he was cold. Or fevered. Roderick could not tell.

      A quieter voice beyond the black curtain of Roderick’s awareness now deteriorated into a sob, and then Roderick heard Hugh.

      “I wanted to come to you first, but I didn’t know—”

      “No, no,” a woman said. “I understand. I am glad you’ve brought him, although I doubt I can help him.”

      The voice, low and sweet and lilted, filtered through Roderick’s brain in a familiar pattern. He knew this speaker. Who? Who…? Aster? Ophelia? No…

      “You gave him too much, Hugh.” The woman spoke again, closer to Roderick this time. He could feel her warmth near his left side. “He may not wake.” A brief image of dark, sloe-eyed beauty draped in purple silk flashed through Roderick’s memory, but was gone before he could grab it properly.

      Ardis? No, that wasn’t it either….

      “Oh,