Unicorn's Blood by Finney Patricia

Author:Finney, Patricia [Finney, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Climbing Tree Books
Published: 2015-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

IL

IN THE TWO WEEKS after the battle of Zutphen Sir Philip Sidney went from being a lanky, elegant man with a face a little like a sheep to a skeleton with great bruised eyes. Becket had pitied him, for Sidney had never been wounded before, was inexperienced in pain, and his leg was about as bad as it could be and still be attached to his body. By one of the strange miracles of musketry, the ball which shattered his thigh-bone had not touched the great leg artery and so he had not bled to death, although he had bled a great deal. Sidney would not be separated from Becket, refusing to let him be treated in the main camp by the trenches of Zutphen, clinging to him surprisingly. Becket could not remember much about their journey by barge to the house of Mlle Gruithuissen, since he too had lost blood copiously from his shoulder slash and the surgeon had bled both of them a further four ounces on the way, to guard against infection.

Becket did remember trying to talk some sense into Sidney, who turned out to have a surprisingly degree of obstinacy in him, despite his loss of sanguine humour.

“Have them take your leg off,” he remembered saying gruffly, while they lay side by side on their pallets and the barge wallowed its painful way behind the plodding horse on the tow-path, though the rocking and scraping of innumerable locks, to the little town of Arnhem. “Have them cut at the mid-thigh where the bone is sound, and good riddance.”

“No,” Sidney had said through his clamped teeth. “I will not be a cripple.”

“Christ’s guts, man,” Becket had said brutally. “You are crippled. No more tournaments for you, no more battles. The only choice is to be a dead cripple or a live one.”

“No.”

Becket was the stronger, had not in fact wanted to go to Arnhem at all, only Sidney had insisted on it. He was weak with blood-loss and his shoulder burned monstrously, but it had only been a long sword-cut from above, easily washed with aqua vitae and sewn up. There had been no need for boiling oil in the wound to sear out the poison of gunpowder, no need for the surgeon’s fingers, nails in mourning with old blood, to go probing about in it looking for a ball and wad. To be sure he was weak, but beef and beer three times a day and a week’s rest, and he knew from experience he would be well enough, providing the wound did not go sick.

At the moment, though, he was no more able to move than Sidney, since his head reeled and pounded and his breath came short if he so much as sat up.

“Listen,” he snarled sideways at Sidney, who was looking mulish. “The bone is shattered above the knee, it was poking through like kindling wood. I saw it. How can you ever get it straight?”

“I have heard it can be done.”

“Where? When?

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