Arkady rolled his eyes, and muttered, “Patrollers!” He drew breath and turned again to Dag. “Twisted and tight as this is now, it’s going to take some careful groundsetting to restore the gut without rupturing it and spilling blood and rotting food into the abdominal cavity, which is a recipe for infection.”
Dag nodded understanding. “Like a knife wound to the belly.”
“Correct. Challa, if I may trouble you to dump a dense ground reinforcement into the inflamed area, we’ll see if we can relieve the tightness a bit before attempting to manipulate anything.”
Challa nodded, laid her hands on the lump, and closed her eyes. Dag sensed the flow of her unshaped ground-gifting into Tapp’s unhappy flesh. The extra ground would support and speed the body’s own attempts to heal, and so ease the swelling and pain. The simplest of procedures; any number of patrollers learned at least that much groundwork, even the younger Dag. The focus of Challa’s groundwork was much finer, however, and its density impressive.
“While we’re waiting for that to take effect,” Arkady went on, “let me tell you more…”
Dag, willingly, and Tapp, much less willingly, were then treated to a detailed description of half a dozen other ways Dag would never have imagined that folks’ insides could end up in places where they did not belong, and what to do about it. Dag was especially impressed, or appalled, by the version that had the stomach squeezing through the little hole in the diaphragm where the gullet connected, and ending up half on one side and half on the other. About the time Tapp must have been wishing he’d never been born, Arkady wrapped up his talk and cupped his hands gently around the bulge. Dag extended his sensitivity to his utmost. Down and in. Arkady glanced up keenly at him, then returned his attention to his task, closing his eyes in concentration.
Arkady’s ground-fingers shaped themselves in unfingerlike ways to gently widen the hole, tease the gut knot apart, and slide the strained tissue back inside. In a sallow sweat, Tapp whimpered; his partner gripped his hand hard and watched him in concern, all patroller-humor extinguished.
The power, thought Dag. The power to so readily move matter through its ground was immense, yet Arkady’s ground projection danced as delicately as if he were laying out flower petals that he was trying not to crush. He persuaded the two sides of the ripped hole back together, then set a neatly shaped ground reinforcement to hold them that way. Tapp’s strained face and grip eased, and he lay back bonelessly on the table. It had all been done in less than ten minutes, without ever breaking the skin.
“I’ll send one of the ham-handed novices down to your tent tonight to give you another reinforcement,” Arkady told Tapp, and glanced up.
“Has anyone told his wife yet that he’s home early? ”
“I sent the boy,” said Challa.
Indeed, Tapp’s wife arrived in a few minutes more, irate with worry, and the Tapp, what did you do to yourself? and It wasn’t my fault! conversation was repeated, with variations. Arkady prudently gave most of his instructions to her-bed rest and no food till tomorrow, camp rest till Challa decreed otherwise. Dag helped carry Tapp back out to the horse litter and saw him trundled off, escorted by his partner and his wife.
Staring after them, Dag turned his hook this way and that, trying to imagine the groundwork that would persuade half of someone’s stomach back to its proper position through such a little hole without bursting it under the heart.
Arkady, stretching his back beside Dag, said, “He’ll recover well if he doesn’t overdo. It didn’t help that he was two days fooling around with the rupture and telling his patrol leader he’d be fine before he even started home, his partner says. Patrollers have no sense, sometimes.”
“Goes with the territory,” Dag said. “Sensible people don’t go looking for malices.”
“I suppose you would know.”
“Forty years at it, sir.”
“Huh. I guess it would be about that.” He frowned at Dag’s hook.
“Before and after the hand, then? Because it looks like that’s been off for about twenty years, there.”
“Aye,” said Dag. “Just about that.” But if Arkady was angling for an old patroller story, he was doomed to disappointment. A more important question occurred to Dag then. “Sir-why didn’t you get cold and shaky after doing that groundwork? ”
Arkady’s head turned. “What, do you? ”
“After all my healings, pretty much, and that glass-bowl episode knocked me on my tail. My flesh felt like clay, and my stomach heaved.”
“Well, then, you were doing something wrong.”
“What? ”
“We’ll have to figure that out.” Arkady rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand and stared curiously at Dag, but did not pursue the matter at once. Instead, he turned Dag over to Challa while he went off to, he said, check on a few folks.
Challa showed Dag her tent’s record-keeping methods, more pleased than was quite flattering to learn that the shabby northerner could read and write. They were interrupted once by a woman whose toddler’s oozing sore throat had not responded to home ground reinforcements, and a second time by a boy, frog-marched in by his father, in need of having his bloodied head stitched after a fight with his brother. A rock seemed to have been involved, presented as evidence, or possibly a souvenir, by the irate and dizzy loser.
As she worked, Challa kept up a gentle and seemingly habitual flow of instruction and commentary that Dag drank in-with the growing sense that he was just the latest in a long line of apprentices to pass through her tent. Dag was painfully aware that he was of no help in stitching up the flap of scalp, but at least his hook provided a useful diversion while the sewing was going on. The boy ingenuously demanded the tale-severely abridged by Dag-of how the missing hand had been bitten off by a mud-wolf, then set his quaking lip and endured his own little ordeal under Challa’s curved needle with fresh determination.
Challa suppressed a smile and complimented his courage.
Barr popped in then with the news that the lunch basket and Arkady had both arrived back at the house. Dag paced silently beside him up the road, his head awhirl with his morning’s tutorials. The range of things he didn’t know seemed to be expanding at an alarming rate.
–-
This lunch basket yielded ham sandwiches and plunkin, swiftly consumed.
While Fawn, Remo, and Barr cleared away the plates and crumbs from the round table, Arkady arose and went to one of his shelves. He returned with a piece of paper and sat again across from Dag. Instead of presenting it to read, he turned it over and tore it in half.
“Now,” he said, “let’s just see what it is you’re doing that’s giving you trouble. Watch. Ah-with your groundsense, please.”
What is he about? Dag opened himself and attended, summoning the concentration of the morning against a drift toward a postlunch nap.
Arkady eased the two pieces back in line, held them down on the table, and ran his thumb down the tear. Behind the barely perceptible ground projection, the paper hissed back together. He held it up and snapped it, then turned it and tore it in half again. Fawn and the boys abandoned the sink and slid hastily back into their chairs to watch.
It had been so swift, Dag was barely certain what he’d sensed, but he dutifully positioned the halves on the table in front of him, edged them together as best he could, extended his ghost hand, closed his eyes, and found that strange level of perception, down and in, that he had first discovered while healing Hod. Paper, it seemed, was much like felted cloth, a mass of tiny threads all matted together-torn away from one another, now. He was put in mind of how Fawn had spun the threads for their wedding cords, making the fibers twirl around and catch hold.
So freshly separated, these fibers’ grounds still held the echo of their former friction. This will be easy. He smiled and drew his hook down the edges, his ghost thumb persuading them back together.
And opened his eyes in consternation as the paper burst into flame along the line of his repair. He beat it out in hasty embarrassment.
Barr ducked the flying char and said, “It’s not anybody’s birthday, Dag! Take it easy!”
Dag brushed futilely at the scorch marks on Arkady’s table. “Sorry. Sorry! I’m not sure what happened just there.”
“Mm-huh,” said Arkady, leaning back with narrowed eyes and not sounding the least surprised. “As I thought.
