Assignment in Nowhere by Keith Laumer

Author:Keith Laumer [Laumer, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Dobson Books Ltd
Published: 1968-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Daylight came after a long time. Ironel was asleep, her head on Roosevelt's bed. When I woke her, she smiled at me.

"He still lives, Richard," she said. I checked his pulse again. It was still there, but his breathing was shallow and ragged. I touched the depressed fracture over his eye.

"I've got to do something about this," I said. "Do you have any way to make fire?"

"Ronizpel fears the fire," she said. "But he will bring it to me." I examined the wound. There was one main bone splinter, with some smaller fragments. Ironel came back with a shallow brass tray with glowing embers in it. I didn't ask questions, just added some wood to the coals and got a brisk fire going, and sterilized my knife blade in it. I made an incision across the wound, crossed it with another, and folded back the flaps of skin. Ironel stepped in like a trained nurse, following every step, acting without even words from me. While she held the incision open, I used a hook bent from wire and heat-sterilized to lift the big splinter back into position, then probed for the others. After a while I was finished. I closed the wound and he was still breathing. Ironel used red silk thread to stitch up the cuts. She finished and then sat beside him, watching his face. I found a corner and went to sleep.

I woke up with light in my face; Ironel was beside me; her face was cameo-pale against the shadows.

"Richard-I am afraid for Pieter."

I got up and went to him. He lay on his back on the bed. His eyes were closed and sunken, his face drawn into a tortured rictus. He snarled between his locked teeth, and his hands raked at the coverlet.

"No," he ground out the words. "Never . . . bend the knee . . . better . . . eternal destruction . . ." His voice ran off into a mutter. I put my fingers against his neck. He was hot as new-cast iron. The wound in his forehead was swollen and inflamed.

"I'm sorry," I said. "We need medicines we don't have."

"Richard," the girl said. "Chazz says we must bring Pieter to him." I looked at her. Her eyes were big and dark, her hair red-black, a damp curl against her white skin.

"We shouldn't move him."

"But-Chazz cannot come here, Richard!"

I looked at Roosevelt. I didn't know much about medicine, but I'd seen a dying man before. I lifted him and the girl led the way down through the dark halls among the black vines and the fallen statuary and out into the perfumed night.

Stone mermaids cavorted in a dry fountain at the center of a weed-choked garden. Ironel pulled aside the leafy branch of a twisted bush that grew up through a crack in the basin, exposing an opening. Stone steps led down at a steep angle into an odor of mushrooms and wet clay. Ironel led the way. In a room at the bottom, she flashed my handlight on sagging shelves loaded with dusty wine bottles.

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