Wave Without A Shore

XXVI

The pain grew less. There was a morning, a dewy, otherwise unpleasant morning when clothing was sodden, when the bandages were somewhat looser, and Sbi so carefully began to adjust the splinting, substituting slim green wands.

"They bend," Herrin said, and clamped his lips against the pain as he tried to flex his right hand. "Sbi, they move."

"Yes," said Sbi, although the movement was more a tremor than voluntary. Sbi avowed to have seen it, and kept to his wrapping. "Try, whenever you think of it, try to bend the hands."

"Not much hope, is there?" Herrin asked. "There'll not be anything close to full use of them."

"Bend them when you can."

He nodded, sat patiently while Sbi worked on his hands. Winced sometimes, because the pain was very much still there when some jar set it off again. Sbi chewed a bit of grass . . . incongruous to watch it disappear upward from stem to bearded head and vanish; Sbi did not much eat the stems, but chewed on them from time to time. Herrin had a bit of meat tacked away, but would not eat it in front of Sbi, and a handful of fire-parched grain which at least gave him no stomachache as the raw grain did.

"Here," said Sbi, leaning forward, touched him mouth to mouth and transferred a quick burst of sugary fluid, moisture without which he could not survive. Sbi had developed a deftness about the process which he greatly appreciated, so matter-of-factly performed it failed to bother him as it might.

"It doesn't hurt much," Herrin said, trying the newly bandaged hands. "That's good, Sbi. That's good."

"I hoped so," Sbi said. Sbi plucked another heavy-headed bit of grass and stuck it in his mouth. "Come, are you ready?"

With that they broke their camp, no more than picking themselves up off the ground. They did not use fire often. Sbi had no particular use for it . . . it crumbles, Sbi objected of parched grain; and: There's always something, to the question what ahnit ate when there was no grain ripe. Not animals, Herrin reckoned, never that; he tried this and that as they walked . . . and more than once Sbi stopped him before he picked some plant. "Deadly," Sbi would say, or: "You won't like that; very bitter."

"Don't you ever eat in the city?" Herrin wondered once.

"I fancy beer," said Sbi, "and cake."

Herrin thought of both and suffered. Of a sudden he thought of porridge, and cold mornings and warm beds; of sights and scents and sounds which came back together and had to do with home.

And that afternoon they came to the Camus valley, overlooking the town he remembered.

"It's there," he exclaimed; "it's there, Sbi."

And he started down the hill, tired as he was, remembering where a road was which led to home.