Broken collarbone. I’ll have to immobilize the right arm. No wonder it hurts like the Haighlei hells! Well, so much for doing any lifting or wielding any weapons.
Her questing fingers ran over her face and head without encountering anything worse than a goose-egg knot on her skull and more spatters of congealing blood. With the same care as before, she stretched out her right leg, then her left.
Bruises. Lots and lots of bruises, which just at the moment she couldn’t feel at all.
I must be black and blue from head to toe. That could be bad; she’d start to stiffen up soon, and in the morning it would be worse.
She cradled her right arm in her left hand, and worked her legs until they were under her and she was in a kneeling position. She couldn’t see anything but the basket at the moment, but from the direction that the ropes went, Tad should be right behind her.
She was almost afraid to look. If he were dead—
She turned, slowly and carefully, and let out a sob of relief as she saw him—and saw his sides heaving. He wasn’t dead! He wasn’t in good shape, but he was still breathing!
He lay sprawled atop a tangle of crushed bushes, still unconscious. His left wing was doubled up underneath him at an angle that was not natural, with his primary feathers pointing forward instead of back, most of them shredded and snapped. So he had one broken wing for certain, and that meant that he would not be flying off anywhere for help.
As she shifted again, trying to get to her feet, his eyes opened, and his beak parted. A thin moan came from him, and he blinked dazedly.
“Don’t move,” she called sharply. “Let me get over there and help you first.”
“Wing—” That came out in a harsh whisper, and he panted with pain.
“I know, I can see it. Just hold still and let me get to you.” Gritting her teeth, she worked her right arm inside her tunic and belted the garment tightly, using only her left hand. That would do for immobilizing the shoulder for now.
She stood up with the aid of the debris around her, and worked her way over to Tad. Once there, she stared at him for a moment, deciding where to begin. The rain forest was unnervingly quiet.
“Can you wiggle the toes on your left hind foot?” she asked.
He did so, then repeated the gesture with his right, then his foreclaws. “The right rear hurts when I move, but not as if something is broken,” he offered, and she heaved a sigh of relief.
“All right, your back isn’t broken, and neither are your legs; that’s better than we had any right to expect.” The knife she had been trying to use to get him free was gone, but now she could reach all the snap-hooks holding the ropes to his harness. Hissing with pain every time her shoulder was jarred in the least, she knelt down in the debris of crushed branches and scratchy twigs and began un-snapping him.
“I think I’m one big bruise,” he said, as she worked her hand under him to free as many of the ropes as she could without having him move.
“That makes two of us,” she told him, straining to reach one last set of snap-hooks. He knew better than to stir until she told him to; any movement at all might tear fragile blood vessels in the wings where the skin was thinnest, and he would bleed to death before she could do anything to help him.
Finally, she had to give up on that last set. She moved back to his head, and studied his pupils. Was one a little smaller than the other? Without a light to make them react, she couldn’t tell. “You might have a concussion,” she said doubtfully.
“You might, too,” he offered, which she really could have done without hearing. I can’t wait for the concussion-headache to set in.
“Just lie there,” she advised him. “I’m going after the medical gear.”
If I can find the medical gear. If it’s still worth anything.
It had been packed on top of the supplies, even though that meant it had to be offloaded and set aside every time they stopped for the night. Now she was glad that she had retained the packing order that the supply sergeant had ordained for the basket; they would have been in worse shape if she’d had to move foodstuffs, camping gear, and the tent to get at it!
The only question is, did everything fall on top of it?
She worked her way over to the basket again, to find to her great relief that the medical supplies were still “on top”—or rather, since the basket was on its side, they were still the things easiest to reach.
Although “easiest to reach” was only in a relative sense. . . .
She studied the situation before she did anything. The basket was lying in a heap of broken branches; the supplies had tumbled out sideways and now were strewn in an arc through that same tangle of branches. The medical supplies were apparently caught in a forked sapling at about shoulder height, but there was a lot of debris around that sapling. It would be very easy to take a wrong step and wind up twisting or even breaking an ankle—and she only had one hand to use to catch herself. And then, the fall could knock her out again, or damage her collarbone even worse—or both.
But they needed those supplies; they needed them before they could do anything else.
I’ll just have to be very, very careful. She couldn’t see any other way of reaching the package.
“Tad? Tad, can you concentrate enough to use a moving spell?”
All she got back was a croaked “No . . .” and a moan of pain.
Well. . . it wasn‘t a very good idea anyway. A delirious gryphon casting a spell nearby is more risky for me than if I tried running up that tree!
It looked like she would have to make it by foot. It was an agonizing journey; she studied each step before she took it, and she made certain that her footing was absolutely secure before she made the next move. She was sweating like a foundered horse before she reached the sapling, both with the strain and with the pain. It took everything she had to reach up, pull the package loose, then numbly toss it in the direction of the clear space beside Tad. It was heavier than it looked—because of the bonesetting kit, of course. She nearly passed out again from the pain when she did so—but it landed very nearly where she wanted it to, well out of the way of any more debris.
She clung to the sapling, breathing shallowly, until the pain subsided enough that she thought she could venture back the way she had come. Her sweat had turned cold by now, or at least that was how it felt, and some of it ran underneath the crusting scabs of dried blood and added a stinging counterpoint to her heartbeat.
When she reached the spot beside her precious package, she simply collapsed beside it, resting her head on it as she shuddered all over with pain and exertion. But every time she shook, her shoulder awoke to new pain, so it was not so much a moment of respite as it was merely a chance to catch her breath.
With the aid of teeth and her short boot knife she wrestled the package open, and the first thing she seized was one of the vials of pain-killing yellow-orchid extract. She swallowed the bitter potion down without a grimace, and waited for it to take effect.
She’d only had it once before, when she’d broken a toe, and in a much lighter dose. This time, however, it did not send her into light-headed giddiness. It numbed the pain to the point where it was bearable, but no more than that. Another relief; the pain must be bad enough to counteract most of the euphoric effect of the drug.