Tarashana Rachel Neumeier (top 10 motivational books TXT) 📖

led me only a short distance, along the stream and through a small wood, to a place where low hills rose up. Here he showed me a house, built of earth and into the earth. This house had been set into a hill where the stream turned aside. Flowers grew up the walls and grasses grew on the roof, so that the place seemed part of the hill. The door stood open and so did the windows, three of them in a row. Small birds called to one another, little ones, earth-colored. They fluttered amid the grasses, undisturbed by our presence.

When the man entered the house, I followed again. There was only one room, a long one, running back into the hill. Starlight came in through the windows and the door, and a lamp hung on a chain. The oil in the lamp was fragrant with some scent I did not know, almost like flowers. The floor was beaten earth, but covered with mats woven of grasses, each with a subtle pattern worked into the weaving. A low table, at a level comfortable for a person sitting on the floor, took up the center of the room. Earthenware bowls covered with cloths stood on the table, and a round loaf of bread, and narrow earthenware cups, and a pitcher. A small glass bottle stood beside the cups, filled with some red liquid—wine, I thought, but darker in color than any other Tarashana wine I had ever tasted.

A couch, or perhaps a narrow bed, stretched along one wall, a blanket folded and lying across its cushions. At the near end of the room, a small fire burned in a hearth, so small that the house was not uncomfortably warm. At the far end of the room, a tributary of the stream came into the house; it curved around and flowed out again through a different wall. The sound of the moving water was soothing.

The man said, his voice soft, “I ask that you permit me to tend your wounds. I most earnestly ask this. I promise that I am a skilled healer.” He waited, his gaze lowered, for me to decide.

I did not care about my injuries. I even welcomed the pain, in a way. That distracted my mind from other things that hurt me more, things I did not want to think about. But I knew it would be stupid and childish to refuse. I said, “Yes. I thank you for your kindness.”

The man went to the table and lifted the small bottle. “If you drink this, you will sleep for a little time. Will you drink, so that I may tend your wounds without causing further pain?”

“No,” I said curtly. His manner did not change at all, but I knew my answer had been too abrupt. I said, “I do not distrust you. I do not mind the pain.”

He only nodded. “If you might be pleased to sit by the stream,” he suggested, and himself moved to kneel there, laying out tools I had not known he carried. Needles, and a kind of thread, and a small, slender knife with a tiny slanted blade. The knife was made of wood, beautifully carved with a serpent that carried something in its mouth. The blade did not look like metal at all, but like glass. I was not very interested, but I thought the man must indeed be a skilled healer, to carry a knife that had been made with such care for its purpose.

I sat down by the stream, setting my mind at a distance and relaxing the muscles of my shoulders, my arms, my body.

I knew at once he was indeed skilled. He splashed a liquid across the cuts, which stung sharply but then eased the pain. Then he set many tiny stitches very quickly, more quickly than I had ever seen anyone work, Ugaro or Lau. He dealt with the wound on my side first, then the lesser wounds, then at last the fevered cuts across my stomach. He took out Lalani’s stitches and cleaned the cuts, opening one where it had closed across fevered flesh. He spread an ointment across those cuts before he closed them again.

The Tarashana man worked swiftly, but long before he was finished, I knew how stupid I had been to refuse the medicine that would have let me sleep. But somehow, despite all that had happened, I still had too much pride to say this had been a mistake. I would not have thought I had any pride left at all, but I did not ask for that medicine, even though by the end, I had to work hard to keep myself still and relaxed while he worked.

When he had finished, the man gathered his tools and put them away. “This is your place now,” he said gently. “Stay here as long as you wish. Do you need help to stand, or to reach the bed? Shall I bring you something to eat?”

I wanted to go home. I wanted the winter country as a child longs for his mother. I wanted my mother—or perhaps I wanted to ride out alone into the cold and silence of the steppe and never speak to any person again.

I said, “I thank you for your kindness. I do not need help.”

The man bowed his head to me, rose to his feet, and left me as quietly as he had come. I still did not know his name, but I did not care. I scooped water from the stream with my hand and drank. The water was cool and sweet, tasting of earth and rain. I thought of lying down where I was, by the stream. But after a little while, I made the effort to get to my feet. I went to the table, and looked in the bowls. One held fruit, berries of some kind I did not know, pink and