The fellow stepped back. “I can tell you about your enemy.”
Halla slammed the butt of her spear against the ground. “You are the oracle?”
The young man said, “That’s a bit grandiose. At least it sounds that way to me.”
I sneered without looking up from Pil. “Well, oracle, are you any good? Or are you as full of shit as that last oracle?” I touched the dying girl’s splintered jaw. “How many oracles do you have around here, anyway? Oh, hell, you can just wait right there until I’m done.”
“Hold on a moment,” the oracle said in a stiff voice. “I don’t care for abasement and animal sacrifice and all that, although a little gift is nice. But you are pushing the bounds of politeness. I needn’t share my wisdom with you unless I care to. If you act rudely, I may just tell you to go away.”
Halla gritted her teeth. “Bib . . .”
I glared at her. “I’m busy here!”
“We’re very sorry, oracle. Please forgive us.” I heard the smile in Halla’s voice and glanced up to see the uncomfortable thing sitting on her face. I also saw the carnage behind her. Corpses pocked the ground like bloody mushrooms. The wounded staggered and fell. The grieving knelt beside the dead and wept. One of the tents was ablaze, and black, fatty smoke rose from it.
I turned my attention back to Pil. Behind me Halla cleared her throat. “Well . . . oracle, would you like a beverage while you wait?”
I heard the oracle say yes, but I never learned what Halla brought him. I knelt over Pil, pulling green bands and sheets out of nothingness and using them to rebuild her chest. Every time I took a pain away from her, it appeared inside me, although not as great. Sorcerers have long argued about why healing produces pain for the healer. Some have fought and even killed each other over the question, which says more about the folly of man than could any thousand sermons. Myself, I believe the gods made things work that way to discourage us from being nice to one another.
When I had saved Pil from the risk of expiring with her next breath, I restored the structure of her chest. I gave her body the right push toward recovery and the power to recover once pushed. A band of invisible knives slowly cinched around my ribs. I could hardly draw a breath without my eyes rolling up.
Then I wheezed and sweated as I addressed Pil’s smashed face. I found the work tricky anyway because of her peculiar beauty. I wanted to restore it for her. Not many of us are given something truly remarkable, and losing this would be a damned shame for her.
I believe I did a near-perfect job. My face felt like it had been stomped, hit with hammers, and then pulled apart with white-hot pliers. I finished by repairing Pil’s arms and leg, which required the least delicate touch. It added some nice throbbing limbs to my final mix of pains. I would have enjoyed passing out, but that didn’t happen. The pain would fade within a few hours, or at most a day, so I hissed a lot and eased myself into a period of lying in the dirt, trying not to move or breathe.
The oracle would just have to wait on me. I hoped that Halla had plenty of whatever he liked to drink.
SEVEN
I once adored soothsayers, oracles, and even scabby village healers if they had a bit of the Sight. Whenever a drunkard or whore told me about some pure, transcendent seer, I would search her out, ready to make detours that would infuriate my companions. But contrary to common wisdom, future-tellers never lived up on mountains or out in swamps. They lived within walking distance of people who wanted their futures read.
That should have warned me that being an oracle was less of a mystical calling and more of a mercantile operation.
Whenever I dragged my comrades in search of a seer, I would describe how knowledge of the future would be an important tactical advantage. That was crap, of course. I just wanted the soothsayers to tell me where to go and who’d be waiting for me when I got there. Or where not to go and who could eat dirt because they missed the chance to do me harm. The predictions mostly came true, if I looked at things the right way and ignored a few details.
One cherry blossom–fluttering day on which nothing bad could possibly happen, a tiny old fortune-telling woman promised me, with unimpeachable certainty, that the road east was clear and safe. I traveled down that road, where about fifty ruffians caught me and tortured me for quite a few hours before I managed to slip away.
I ran back to the village bare as a baby pig, begged a sheet to wrap around my nakedness, and charged into the old woman’s house to strangle her. I found her already dead on her kitchen floor, killed by some malady that left a carpet of sores on her face.
Knowing that the gods didn’t care about me, or her, or those torturing sons of bitches, I praised her death as a random occurrence. Then I swore off oracles and resolved to travel into the future like everybody else, full of apprehension and unjustified optimism.
At the fairgrounds, most of the pain from healing Pil had eased by midafternoon. I sat up and found the girl holding my hand. “Don’t think anything special about my helping you, young woman. I would have done the same for a kitten or a moneylender.”
Pil stared at me blank-faced, held my right hand tight, and didn’t speak.
I realized that my left thumb was tingling. When I wiggled the digit, it went numb. But I had just been through a hard fight and an even harder healing, so I put it out of my mind as a random hurt.
Halla leaned over Pil and me.
