Free The Silver Branch [book II] by Rosemary Sutcliff Page B

went out into the evening light, and there, leaning against the sun-washed wall, found a man naked save for a wolf-skin belted about his hips, and with a shoulder swathed in stained and bloody rags; a man much taller than was usual with his kind, with a mane of hair as thick and proudly tawny as a lion’s, and eyes in his head like a pretty girl’s. ‘You are the Healer with a Knife?’ he said, with the simple and direct dignity of wild places. ‘I come to you that you may heal my shoulder.’
    ‘Come you into the Healing-Place, and show it to me,’ said Justin.
    The man looked up at the low range of the hospital block beside him. ‘I like not the smell of this place, but I will come, because you bid me,’ he said, and followed Justin through the doorway, In the surgery, Justin made him sit down on a bench under the window, and began to undo the filthy rags about his arm and shoulder. When the last of them came away, he saw that the man had been only lightly mauled in the first place, but that with neglect the wounds had become sick, and now his whole shoulder was in a bad way.
    ‘This was not done an hour ago,’ Justin said.
    The man looked up, ‘ Na , half a moon since.’
    ‘Why did you not come here when the harm was new?’
    ‘Nay, I would not come for so small a matter as a wolf-bite; but the wolf was old and his teeth bad, and the bite does not heal.’
    ‘ That is a true word,’ Justin said.
    He brought fresh linen and salves, and a flask of the native barley spirit that burned like fire in an open wound. ‘Now I am going to hurt you,’ he said.
    ‘I am ready.’
    ‘Hold still, then; your arm like that—so.’ He cleansed the wounds with searching thoroughness, while the hunter sat like a stone under his ruthless surgery; then salved them and bound the man’s shoulder with strips of linen. ‘That is done for today. Only for today, mind; you must come back tomorrow—every day for many days.’
    In the doorway of the hospital block they parted. ‘Come back at the same hour tomorrow, friend,’ Justin said, and watched him go with the long, light step of the hunter across the parade-ground toward the gate, and scarcely expected to see him again. So often they did not come back.
    But next evening at the same hour the man was once again leaning against the wall of the hospital block. And every day after that he appeared, sat like a stone to have his wounds dressed, and then disappeared until the same time next day.
    On the seventh evening Justin had started to change the dressing as usual, when a shadow darkened the door and Flavius appeared on his way to look in, as he often did, on the legionary Manlius, who was still cot-bound with his broken leg. He looked in passing at the two under the window, and then checked, with his eyes on the man’s shoulder, drawing in his breath in a hiss.
    ‘It was looking worse than this a few days since,’ Justin said.
    Flavius peered more closely. ‘It looks ugly enough now. Wolf?’
    The hunter looked up at him. ‘Wolf,’ he agreed.
    ‘How did it happen?’
    ‘Nay, whoever knows how these things happen? They are too swift in the happening for any man to know. But it will be a while and a while before I hunt with the Painted People again.’
    ‘The Painted People,’ Flavius said. ‘Are you not, then, one of the Painted People?’
    ‘I? Am I blue from head to heel, that I should be one of the Painted People?’
    That was true; painted he was, with blue warrior patterns on breast and arms, but not as the Picts with their close-set bands of tattooing all over their bodies. He was taller and fairer than most of the Picts, also, as Justin had thought when he first saw him leaning against the hospital wall.
    ‘I am of the people of the firths and islands of the west coast up yonder, beyond the old Northern Wall; the people that were from Erin in the old times.’
    ‘A Dalriad,’ Flavius said.
    The hunter seemed to draw himself together a little under