He cursed the small confines of his room as he stepped over her feet to reach the medicine chest. He opened it and picked through it, and then tossed his selections on the bunk beside her. He moved the lantern a bit closer; it was still too dim to see clearly. She winced as his fingers walked over her scalp, trying to part her thick dark hair and find the source of all the blood. His fingers were wet with it; it was still bleeding sluggishly. Well, scalp wounds always bled a lot. He knew that, it should not worry him. But it did, as did the unfocused look to her eyes.
“I'm going to have to cut some of your hair away,” he warned her, expecting a protest. “If you must.”
He looked at her more closely. “How many times did you get hit?”
“Twice. I think.”
“Tell me about it. Tell me everything you can remember about what happened tonight.”
And so she spoke, in drifting sentences, while he used scissors to cut her hair close to the scalp near the wound. Her story did not make him proud of his quick wits. Put together with what he knew of the evening, it was clear that both he and Althea had been targeted to fill out the Jolly Gal's crew. It was only the sheerest luck that he was not chained up in her hold even now.
The split he bared in her scalp was as long as his little finger and gaping open from the pull of her queue. Even after he cut the hair around it to short stubble and cleared the clotted strands away, it still oozed blood. He blotted it away with a rag. “I'll need to sew this shut,” he told her. He tried to push away both the wooziness from whatever had been in his beer and his queasiness at the thought of pushing a needle through her scalp. Luckily Althea seemed even more beclouded than he was. Whatever the crimpers had put in the beer worked well.
By the lantern's shifting yellow light, he threaded a fine strand of gut through a curved needle. It felt tiny in his callused fingers, and slippery. Well, it couldn't be that much different from patching clothes and sewing canvas, could it? He'd done that for years. “Sit still,” he told her needlessly. Gingerly he set the point of the needle to her scalp. He'd have to push it in shallowly to make it come up again. He put gentle pressure on the needle. Instead of piercing her skin, her scalp slid on her skull. He couldn't get the needle to slide through.
A bit more pressure and Althea yelled, “Wah!” and suddenly batted his hand away. “What are you doing?” she demanded angrily, turning to glare up at him.
“I told you. I've got to stitch this shut.”
“Oh.” A pause. “I wasn't listening.” She rubbed at her eyes, then reached back to touch her own scalp cautiously. “I suppose you do have to close it,” she said ruefully. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. “I wish I could either pass out or wake up,” she said woefully. “I just feel foggy. I hate it.”
“Let me see what I have in here,” he suggested. He knelt on one knee to rummage through the ship's stores of medicines. “This stuff hasn't been replenished in years,” he grumbled to himself as Althea peered past his shoulder. “Half the containers are empty, the herbs that should be green or brown are gray, and some of the other stuff smells like mold.”
“Maybe it's supposed to smell like mold?” Althea suggested.
“I don't know,” he muttered.
“Let me look. I used to restock the Vivacia's medicines when we got to town.” She leaned against him to reach the chest in the small space between the bunk and the wall. She inspected a few bottles, holding them up to the lamp light and then setting them aside. She opened one small pot, wrinkled her nose in distaste at the strong odor, and capped it again. “There's nothing useful in there,” she decided, and sat back on the bunk. “I'll hold it closed and you just stitch it. I'll try to sit still.”
“Just a minute,” Brashen said grudgingly. He had saved part of the plug of cindin. Not a very large part, just a bit to give him something to look forward to on a bad day. He took it out of his coat pocket and brushed lint off it. He showed it to Althea and then carefully broke it in two pieces. “Cindin. It should wake you up a bit, and make you feel better. You do it like this.” He tucked it into his lower lip, packed it down with his tongue. The familiar bitterness spread through his mouth. If it hadn't been for the taste of the cindin, he thought ruefully, he might have tasted the drug in his beer. He pushed that aside as a useless thought and nudged the cindin away from the earlier sore.
“It'll taste very bitter at first,” he warned her. “That's the wormwood in it. Gets your juices going.”
She looked very dubious as she tucked it into her lip. She made a wry face and then sat meeting his eyes, waiting. After a moment she asked, “Is it supposed to burn?”
“This is pretty strong stuff,” he admitted. “Shift it around in your lip. Don't leave it in one place too long.” He watched the expression on her face slowly change, and felt an answering grin spread over his own. “Pretty good, huh?”
