He pulled out his dagger and slit his brother’s woolen breeches lengthwise, peeling back the cut cloth to expose the flesh beneath it. The skin there, where it was not slick with blood, was white and pallid, and the flesh bulged out in an ugly swelling just below the point where jagged ends of bone protruded through the shredded flesh of the awful wound, which oozed blood sluggishly. Tristan kept talking to me, his eyes moving ceaselessly over the damages beneath his hands, and in a vain effort to keep my mind from dwelling on what I was looking at, I fought to concentrate upon the swirling, drifting snowflakes that filled the air around us, falling in utter silence, those of them that landed on Perceval’s bared leg changing from white to crimson in an instant. Tristan was oblivious to the weather and the cold.
“Well at least he hasn’t severed any major bleeders. So, young Clothar, you are going to use every iota of your strength to pull that leg straight out until it’s so long that the jagged bone ends pull apart from each other. Once you’ve done that, I’ll guide the ends of the bones back into where they should be, and then we’ll splint everything up and it’ll be in the hands of God.” He bellowed up to Bors, whom we could hear banging on the cart above our heads. “There’s an ax in the toolbox by the driver’s bench. Use it.” He turned back to me. “Right, Perceval might be coming back to life at any moment, so let’s get this over and done with, if we can. Are you ready?” I nodded that I was. “Good. Do it, then. Pull, and don’t stop until I tell you to stop. Go!”
I threw myself backward, my eyes screwed tightly shut against all distractions as I concentrated upon keeping my body at full stretch, pulling at Perceval’s leg, which felt heavy and lifeless. Once, twice, I felt as though something shifted and then I felt a lateral movement and heard Tristan grunt.
“Right,” he said. “That’s it. You can stop pulling now. I can’t do any more. That’s as close as I can bring it to being where it was before.”
I relaxed and immediately felt myself on the verge of total collapse, exhausted by the effort I had been sustaining. Above our heads, Bors was now chopping hard, but even as I grew aware of that the noises stopped, and moments later we heard the sounds of him scrambling down to join us again. He brought four long, narrow boards with him, and a long coil of thin hempen rope.
“I brought some water, too.”
“Good lad,” Tristan said. “Do you have any clean cloth? I’ll need one piece to wash his wound and another to use as a bandage.”
“I’ve got cloth,” I said, remembering that I was wearing an extra tunic of plain white cloth beneath my quilted one, for additional warmth. I quickly stripped it off and shrugged back into my outer clothes before the cold could even penetrate. Tristan ripped it into two pieces, one much larger than the other, and used the smaller piece to wash away the blood that was now crusting on his brother’s thigh. He used a corner of the larger piece to dry the skin, after which he folded the remainder into a pad that he placed directly over the wound, binding it in place with strips of the wet cloth. I had noticed that the bleeding had lessened perceptibly since Tristan’s ministrations, and apparently that was a good thing, because Tristan mentioned it, too, in an approving murmur.
He then splinted the leg, cutting the rope into lengths before calling on Bors and me to hold the boards in place along the limb while he tied them into place. He worked swiftly and with great confidence, and I was much impressed with his self-possession and the competence with which he had managed the entire affair, from the first moment of his looking at his brother, assessing the situation and what had to be done.
“Where did you learn to do all that?” I asked when the last ties were in place and he sighed and slouched back against the bole of a tree.
“Hmm. I didn’t learn. I saw it done once, though, after an action against the Burgundians, not far south of Lutetia. One of our senior centurions, an old sweat called Lucius, fell into a ravine, from horseback. The situation was quite similar to this one, in fact, except that Lucius had an arrow in him, too. That’s what caused him to fall in the first place. Anyway, an old friend of his, who had been a medic decades earlier, before becoming a centurion, knew what to do. I was in the situation you were in today, so I wasn’t nearly as sure about what I needed me to do. But I remembered the old medic talking about how we needed to stretch the leg and bring the broken bone ends back together.”
“You’ve never done that before, ever?”
Tristan heard the wonder in my voice and frowned slightly. “No, and I’d feel a lot better about it if my beloved brother there would just wake up, or grunt, or puke or something.” He stooped forward and placed the flat of his hand against Perceval’s brow. “Well, he’s still breathing, at any rate, so I suppose there’s nothing more for us to do but wait.” He glanced up at the cliff above us and shook his head in rueful wonder. “I have absolutely no idea how we’re ever going to get him out of here.”
“I have, sir.”
Both of us turned to look at Bors. He shrugged and held up both hands in a curiously helpless gesture.
“I found a set of pulley blocks in the toolbox with the ax.” He looked from one to the other of us, but when neither of us showed any reaction he continued. “There’s no poles, but we have an ax and we’re surrounded by trees, and we’ve lots and lots of rope.”
“So?” Tristan was clearly not understanding what Bors was telling him, and neither was I. “What are you talking about, Bors?”
He blinked at us both in astonishment, and then he grew suddenly confident. “We can build a hoist, like the ones the sailors used to load the feed for our horses when we left Gaul. It only needs four stout poles, a few ropes, and a set of pulleys, and we have all of those. Once it’s assembled, we need simply strap Master Perceval to a board and hoist him up directly to the cart, straight up the face of the cliff.”
I remembered seeing the device he was describing, swinging heavy sacks from the wharf and delivering them safely to the ship’s deck, but I had paid it no great amount of attention and now my memory of its workings was clouded, to say the least.
“Straight up the face of the cliff. Can you build such a device, Bors?”
He looked at me wide-eyed. “Aye, sir, I can.”
“Where did you learn to do such a thing?”
His face went blank with astonishment. “Nowhere, Master Clothar. I simply watched what the mariners did, and paid attention to the way the device worked. It was very simple. And then I remembered having seen a similar thing, but much larger, on my father’s farm when I was a boy. One of the workers there, a foreman, taught me about pulleys and tackle and the way they work. He showed me how a single man can lift many times his own weight simply by using ropes threaded through pulleys.”
“And so you now believe you can build such a device and use it to haul Perceval to safety up there on the clifftop?”
“Aye, sir, I do.”
“And the first step toward doing it is what? Cutting down four trees?”
“Four, aye, Master.”
I looked at him one last time, setting my chin and pursing my lips before I spoke. “You are absolutely sure you can do this?”