Lora of Two Worlds

Osler came to stand before the wounded man, and the play went out of his face.

An arrowhead buried in a body is no rare thing. Limb and shoulder — easy work. Anywhere the body bleeds little — easy work: bear the pain, draw it out, stop the blood, and leave the rest to the body's own mending.

But this — only the head gone in, the very tail of it plain to the eye under the skin — that was a thing seldom met.

And had it not shed part of its force in tearing loose from the shaft, the head would not have stopped at merely sinking into him.

"It must be cut open. Only — breach a vessel, and the blood pours into the lung. The man drowns there in himself, on dry land."

Lora nodded in her own mind. The summit of this medicine, so they say, stands in this very age — and here was the proof before her.

Leon passed Osler the drawing of the inward organs. At the first glance he could not tell what he held; the second look set a tremor of excitement in him, and he asked at once:

"This is your hand? The Bright Hall Chart itself does not come up to it for clearness. Where did you come by this?"

The founding King had once looked on a Bright Hall Chart that set out the places of the five organs and six viscera within the body; learning from it that "all a man's five organs hang upon the back," he had decreed the whipping-stick to the buttocks only, never the back. So charts of the body's inward parts were no strangers to the men of the Empire.

"No such skill of mine. This is Roland's sister — my little cousin — her drawing." At that, even the old physician, dim as his eyes had gone, turned his gaze upon the young lady.

And this... how was a body to explain it? Lora's wit turned a quick corner:

"Since you're one of our own, no harm telling you: I had it out of the Grand Strategy of the Realms."

Lora said it without one blush. Seeing Roland and the rest take it without a blink, Osler gave it a fair measure of belief. How a book of heaven had come into her hands he had no leisure to ask — the drawing in his hands held all of him.

Seeing him credit the chart, Lora took it back and set several ribs onto it; between two of them she laid one heavy blot of ink:

"Here — this is the place of the wound. There is a little room left between it and the two great vessels. Hands steady enough, and it can be opened and the arrow drawn."

"I have no instruments. And I have never sewn an inner organ. A living man is not a thing to try an untested hand upon."

Osler spoke it straight. The surgery an ordinary physician ever meets is falls and sprains, boils and sores — few ever come by the chance to open a living body.

Who would have looked for it — the old physician, from the side: "I have instruments. White leather thread for the sewing as well. You can close the outer skin? The inner layers I can teach you."

Only then did Osler see the film lying over the old man's eyes. He looked down at the drawing again, felt out Norton's ribs with his fingers — the blot of ink Lora had set stood where it should. He asked:

"May I ask it, elder — do your eyes still serve?"

"Past two feet, nothing shows. Were these eyes still my own, would I be standing here letting you lift a finger?" The old physician said it with the grudge of a man robbed.

He hauled a medicine chest out from under the compounding rack. Laid in it in good order: needles and knives of every sort, even a small iron hammer and iron pincers. He opened a deerskin roll beside them — and there at last shone out several bright instruments.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Silver?" Lora was struck all amazement. Silver ran thin through the Empire — the needle-work itself mostly went on iron, and instruments of gold and silver fell only to King and princes. And this old physician, poor as a church door, owned surgical silver.

Looking close: a scraper, forceps, a lift — and one scalpel.

"The young lady knows them on sight? My master was a man of the southern provinces, and silver runs thick there. He kept a set of silver needles. Silver, he said, tests poison — and kills it too. Laid to broken skin, it draws a wound to its closing fast. So I spent my savings to the last coin, and the marriage-money my father and mother had scraped together year on year — and at that price I had these few pieces struck."

The tools were no strangers to Osler either. The foreign physicians practice an art of opening the skull; his father had set it down in his own medical papers, with these very instruments drawn beside the words.

He had inherited the medicine of both his lines, father's and mother's — his one gap lay deep in sores, growths, and open wounds.

Osler took his measure in a breath. He swept his robe aside and knelt before the old physician in the full bow: "Elder — I am a man of this medicine. I ask to take you as my master, to study under you and keep you all my life long. What I learn of the art, I will practice on high and low alike — saving the dying, mending the hurt."

Even without any bowing, the old man had already brought his treasure out — he had meant from the first to guide the knife through this young man's hands. He had not looked for one who kept the ethics of the art so straight, and to take an apprentice at the tail end of his own life:

"My eyes are ill — there is not so much I can teach you. But if the will to learn is yours, I'll give all I have, down to the bottom of the sack. As for the bowing — never mind the bowing."

"Master above — receive your pupil's bow." Osler bowed his head to the floor, then smiled: "Master, since you have the scraper here, and your pupil has the gold-spatula eye-scraping in his learning — from tomorrow on, I can make the attempt for you."

That stirred even the old physician. He bent down and patted Norton on the shoulder: "Old man as I am, I ride on your luck in this. Set your heart at rest."

A turn of the road after a dead gorge, truly: the thing that no one of the three — not Lora, not the old physician, not Osler — could have done alone, joined together, they now had a chance of doing.

The knife settled on, the old physician began walking Osler through the way of it and the order of it. Everyone else went out of the little room.

Lora wrote off a run of drug names and prescriptions, quick as her hand could travel, and had Roland send men into the city drug-shops: the anesthetic, disinfectant, styptic, and pain-stilling drafts set down in the medical books of the later ages — all laid in against need.

Lilac she sent to boil the gauze in water and dry it over fire — the best disinfection this day could put its hand to.

Norton drank the mafeisan down and was soon gone under. Three only were left in the little room — and over their heads hung a dozen lanterns and more, drawn together in a cluster.

That too was Lora's notion — crude as it stood, it made shift for the Empire's own shadowless lamp.

With the old physician calling the steps, Osler laid the silver scalpel to Norton's skin and cut.

At last the barbed head stood bare. Lora took it fast in the forceps and drew it out; Osler set his threads to the sewing.

Outside, the waiting gnawed at everyone. Coltrain had a meal laid and waiting; not one of them had the heart for it.

Not till Lora opened the door and came out, pulled the cloth mask down off her face, and breathed one great breath, did anyone stir. She was laughing: "I'm starved half to death — is there no food or isn't there?"

Norton was young, and in his growing years. A wound of the lung like this: two days to be up and seeing to himself; two months to be the man he had been.

They roughed the night through at the manor. And there Leon took the moment to tell Roland and the others about the gold he had:

"The Windsor house has men at every joint of it, top to bottom. Felix — there's no need to run head-on against them just yet. By my reckoning, if only to save its face, that house will see Windsor Yves find some road to pull his steward and Rowena Ashby out clear."

Felix took a pull of his wine, and his eye went once to Lora, head down over the meat: "And that's the end of it, then? If Norton hadn't thrown himself in front of Lora, the one lying on that bed today would be her."

"Right — it is not the end! I refuse to believe the two houses of us together can't fetch our own justice back." Roland had seen the arrowhead sitting in Norton's chest, and the fear of it had only now run him down:

"Leon — ours is the long game, yes. But they are bullying us on our own doorstep. Not to hit back is no longer ours to choose."

Leon turned it over, and chose to swallow the words that had come up to his teeth. He smiled:

"Good. Let them sit in the cells two days more. Tomorrow, Roland — go first and buy the deeds back. The rest we talk of after."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!