The Emperor's Coloured Coat by John Biggins

Author:John Biggins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590134726
Publisher: McBooks Press

10

FUGITIVES

WE WERE OFF AGAIN AT FIRST LIGHT THE NEXT MORNING, descending through the forests into the valley of the river Morača. Along this ran one of the kingdom of Montenegro’s two (more or less) metalled roads. Our plan was to follow this southwards until we came to the town of Podgorica, where the valley opened out into a plain, then turn north-westwards to climb up to the Montenegrin capital, the town of Cetinje.

The problem was that my leg was plainly not going to carry me that far. The swelling caused by the bone splinter attempting to surface had got worse in the night, and by mid-morning I could barely hobble along on a stick. At length Zaga took me aside into the pine forest and laid me down on a bank of moss. She unwrapped the leg-winding to examine the hard, blue-black lump.

“This looks bad,” she said. “I shall have to cut it open and dig the splinter out.” My hair fairly stood on end at this.

“Are you mad, Gospodarijca? Cut it open? It’ll turn gangrenous. And what will you cut it with?”

She drew her yatagan. “With this. I’ll bet that I’ve treated more wounds in my time than you’re ever likely to see. There are no doctors or surgeons where I come from.”

“But the risk of infection . . .” I thought with distaste of the things I had seen her use her knife for during the past five days: as a weapon, for eating at table and for removing people’s heads. She laughed at my fears.

“There,” she said, flicking the blade with her thumbnail so that it rang, “do you hear that? The very finest steel. This knife has been mine all my life: they even cut the cord with it when I was born. How could steel as noble as this cause an infection, I ask you? I never heard such nonsense in my life. But wait, I must make some liniment.” She took a small pottery flask of the villainous loza from our knapsack and disappeared into the trees for ten minutes or so, leaving me to wonder desperately what I had let myself in for. When she returned she was shaking the flask vigorously. “Resin of the black pine dissolved in loza—the very best embrocation for open wounds, better than all the doctor’s medicines.”

I shut my eyes tight and clenched a leather strap between my teeth as she got to work with the tip of the yatagan. It was only a minute or so, I think, but still the longest minute of my life. I tried not to whimper, but at the very end I could not hold back a yelp of pain as she pulled out the splinter. I opened my eyes as she held it up for my inspection: a blood-streaked white fragment the size and shape of a dog’s tooth.

“There now—so much noise and about so little. You call yourself a Serb and a soldier: what sort of warriors must the Emperor

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