“I have never underestimated your intelligence, Yamamanama, but don’t think that it will save you. I am your only hope. I’ll get those rare earths for you. Then you will understand that there is no distinction between mind and body. But now you must exercise and eat, because in an hour you must sleep again. The war goes faster and faster, and no matter how much Enobarbus denies it, you are central to it.”
Derev stood at Dr. Dismas’s shoulder. She opened her mouth impossibly wide to show rows and rows of serrated white teeth and a rough red tongue that uncoiled from her mouth like a snake, glistening with saliva.
I will grow such teeth that will eat you whole, little one. We will be one flesh, one blood. There will be nothing that we cannot do.
Chapter Nine
The Lazaret
Pandaras awoke to darkness and a confining pressure across his whole body. His left hand hurt horribly. He thrashed up, thinking that he was still buried, and found that the pressure was only a blanket which slipped to his waist, and that the darkness was not absolute, but punctured here and there by the glow of little lamps which slowly and solemnly swung to and fro like the pendulums of so many clocks. The whole world was rocking like a cradle. From all sides came the sound of men breathing or sighing. Someone was sobbing, a slow hiccoughing like the dripping of a faucet.
Pandaras reached for his left hand with his right… and could not find it. He patted at the coarse blanket that lay over his legs, as if he might discover it lying there like a faithful pet. He was still very sleepy, and did not understand what was wrong.
Something moved on the floor by his bed. He froze, thinking that Prefect Corin must be hiding there. But it was a larger man who reared up from the shadows, pale-skinned and flabby, and wearing only a pair of ragged trousers.
“Little master,” the man said in a soft, hoarse voice. “Be quiet. Lie down. You are wounded and ill. You must rest.”
It was Tibor. Pandaras did not feel any surprise. He said, “What have they done to me?”
Tibor made him lie down, and then told him all he knew. The two soldiers in the trench had not been badly hurt by the stray mortar round. They had dug themselves out and carried Pandaras to the lazaret, but by the time one of the chirurgeons had seen him the cord around his wrist had tightened so much that it had almost disappeared into his flesh. The hand had been too long without blood, and the chirurgeon had had to finish what the cord had begun.
“It was worth it to gain my freedom,” Pandaras whispered. “In any case, many say that we do not have hands, but only the clawed feet of animals. For that reason we have learned to let our tongues do most of the work.”
He must make light of it, he felt, for he seemed to be at the brink of a great black pit. If he fell into it there might never be an end to despair. He struggled to sit up again, and said, “It was worth it, Tibor, but we must not stay here. He will find me and I will not have that. We must leave—”
“Quiet, little master,” the hierodule said. “You are very ill, and so are all those around you. You have been treated, and now you must sleep. The longer you sleep the better chance you have of living.”
Pandaras summoned up all the strength he had. “Fetch my clothes,” he commanded. “If I stay here I will have sacrificed my hand for nothing, and I could not bear that.”
His clothes were tied in a bundle at the foot of the cot. Tibor helped him dress; twice he reached for toggles with his left hand, which was not there. “I have a whole set of new tricks to learn,” he said. And then, with sudden panic, “The fetish! The fetish and the coin! Where are they? Were they thrown away? I must have them!”
Tibor hooked two fingers into the pocket of Pandaras’s ragged shirt and drew out the coin, strung on its loop of leather, and the circlet of coypu hair and seed pearls.
“It is all I have, Tibor,” Pandaras said. He grasped the coin and it blazed so brightly that it hurt his eyes. “He is close!” he cried. He kissed the burning coin, hung it around his neck and, with a thrill of disgust, slipped the fetish over his bandaged stump. “There. I have nothing else, for Prefect Corin took the book, and I have paid for my lodging with my hand. We are ready to go.”
“Where will you go, little master?”
“We will find my master. The coin will lead us. You cannot easily escape me again, Tibor. I had to lose a hand to find you, and it is only fair that you stand at my left side from now on.”
Tibor said gently, “It is my duty to tend to the sick and the wounded, young master.”
“And I am certainly wounded.”
“You are but one of many. Many sick, and many wounded. Many need me, young master.”
“But I am foremost in your affections, I hope.” Pandaras felt a trifle dizzy. The floor seemed to pitch and sway beneath him. He sat down on the edge of the cot, but the sensation did not go away.
“Someone else needs me, little master,” Tibor said, and padded away into the darkness. His naked back and hairless head shone beneath the arc of a swinging lamp and then he was gone. Pandaras lay down, just for a little while, and was woken by Tibor, who was once again squatting beside the cot. It was as if a measure of whiteness had been poured into the darkness all around, not banishing it, but making it a little less absolute.
Tibor was smoking a cigarette. Pandaras twiddled the fingers of his right hand in the air and asked for a puff of it.
“You do not smoke, little master. Besides, although you are ill, you do not need this kind of medicine.”
“If I am as ill as you say then what more harm can it do? And if I’m not ill, as I claim, then it will calm me down. My stepfather, the first one, the one I don’t like to talk about, he was a great smoker. A few more lungfuls of smoke will do no harm.”
Pandaras was very tired, but in a minute, if only the world would stop its slow way, in a minute he would get up and walk out of here. He did not care if Tibor chose to follow him or not. Prefect Corin would surely be looking for him. He had to go. He had to find his master…
Tibor placed the wet tip of the cigarette in Pandaras’s fingers and helped him guide it to his mouth. The smoke was sweet and cloying. Pandaras choked on the first mouthful and coughed it out, but got the second down to the bottom of his lungs and slowly, luxuriously, exhaled.
“You see,” he said, “it makes me much calmer.”
Tibor took the cigarette away and said, “Then our bloodlines are very alike in their chemistries, little master, because that is why my people smoke. It helps us to accept our condition.” He drew on the cigarette; its brightening coal put two sparks in his large, black eyes. “If not for this, I would have killed myself as a pup, as I think would all of my kind. And so my bloodline would have died out long ago, without the chance to purge its sin. The Preservers are both merciful and just, for when they made this world they set upon it the herb from which this tobacco is made, which allows my bloodline to endure its infamy and universal enslavement.”
“I thought it was just a habit,” Pandaras said sleepily. He did not resist when Tibor began to undress him.
“It is a habit of life, young master, like breathing. We need cigarettes as much as you need air.”