Luckily for me, the only person capable of noticing my pain and tears lay on a bed as an invalid. I felt the pain I went through was worth it when I started to apply my healing skill. Unlike dealing with healing burns, which was the main reason I applied healing on myself in the early days when I practiced using transmutation on the spheres in my hand, cut wounds behaved a bit differently. Firstly, I dealt with inflammation by both cooling inflamed tissue and disinfecting areas with heat. What became immediately apparent when I discovered the infection blooms radiating from the wound, was that different treatment was needed.
I knew that bacteria bred in a wide temperature range, making it difficult to kill them. However, something they couldn’t do well was adjust to fast changes in temperature and that’s where my strength lay. Because I could see the bacterial infection blooms like see through clouds in my heads-up display, I could also monitor the condition of the tissue in the area. That way I lowered or raised the temperature until Ara showed me on the heads-up that the cell tissue approached its limits. I bombarded the bacteria with a temperature variation that stressed them to the max. Those bugs tough enough to survive that treatment weakened enough to be easily nailed by the chemical interaction of the herbs.
Repairing and reconnecting damaged tissue became more about creating bridges between muscle tissue, sinews, and nerves. To help me, I shifted the healthy tissue surrounding the wound and reconnected them in places needing repair. If I were a proper orthopaedic surgeon, I would look to borrow donor tissues from other parts of the body, a skill currently out of my league. The difficulty lay in removing the donor tissue without creating wounds.
I placed the herbs in the wound and closed it with bandages. The wound needed my full support for at least a day because my borrowing of healthy tissue also weakened the area around the wound. The tissue bridges I created would significantly speed up the wound recovery time and the herbs would remove the remaining infection while also aiding recovery. Then all that Commander Karato needed was time. And talking about time, I spent far too much time helping the commander and totally lost track of time. I must have been away from the marquee tent for at least three hours because most of the camp slept fast. Even the nurse that left me originally, returned to see the commander’s progress. When she noticed the commander’s better condition by putting her hand on his forehead, she exclaimed,
“Look at that, I swear the fever he had is already gone. I’ll rewash the wound then.”
Ara raised a concern,
“No.”
I quickly exclaimed to a surprised nurse.
“Please don’t. If you touch the wound now, you can negatively affect his healing. Don’t touch the wound for at least a day. Also, I’ve helped heal the wound, but his body will need to do the rest. To help his body he needs to drink a lot of water for at least a day to help his body flush out the remaining infection.”
The nurse, shocked by my sudden retort, nodded in agreement.
“I’ll just wash him down then and leave the wounded arm.”
She noticed the relief on my face because she smiled at me and started preparing to clean the commander. She shooed me out of tent citing patient privacy and left me standing out in the cold. I headed back to Grenfell to explain my sorry story to him as to why I was late.
Before sunrise the next morning my beauty sleep was rudely awoken by Grenfell.
“Wake up Shane. The camp guards said the night patrol just arrived and discovered a large monster force heading our way, about half a day’s travel from us. We don’t have any time to pack properly as soon as it’s light enough we’ll be leaving.”
We didn’t properly pack the marquee tent up, it was more like we folded it up and threw it on top of the other goods we previously tossed in. As a result, the pile of goods stood like a small hill behind the driver’s seat. As the first dawn light softened the night sky we were packed, ready to go. But just then we received a surprise visit from Commander Karato. He arrived on his horse with a few knights as we waited on the cart.
“Hey old man, I’m glad I caught you before you left.”
“Karato, I thought you were recovering from your wounds?”
The commander feigned surprise.
“What, me? I wouldn’t let a little scratch get me down. Besides, after your apprentice’s intervention I’m already well on the way to recovery.”
I became an unwilling target for everyone’s attention and felt defensive.
“What? I thought you were supposed to be resting that arm?”
He laughed, showing his still bandaged arm in a sling around his neck.
“That nurse made sure I’ll never forget that. Heck, I’m even running bush to bush from the amount of water that woman forces me to drink.”
He said pointing at the large leather water bottle strung up on his horse. It consisted of a bladder from some or other animal and protected by a leather outer. I decided that the wisdom of Sun Tzu required me to remain wisely quiet, who was I to interfere in ablution frivolities and involve myself in more unwanted issues.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“Oh by the way, I may have said a few things last night I wouldn’t normally say. Please forgive me if I spoke out of turn, I wasn’t exactly behaving my normal self.”
I couldn’t let that one up.
“That’s okay Commander. We’ll keep what you said between ourselves.”
He scratched his chin not sure what to make of my reply but decided rather to move on. Finally, he got to the reason for his visit.
“Grenfell, I know you want to head back to Obon, but you know as well as I do that monster will overrun the Obon road in less than a day. Even if you left now, there is no guarantee you can outrun them but if you come with us back to Shimmerstal, we can protect you and look after you until this situation blows over.”
Grenfell looked uncomfortable, which I later realised was because he didn’t want to go to Shimmerstal. But just like I could see sense in Karato’s point, so could Grenfell.
“Okay, I agree on your point, but you’ll need to provide me with a forge for me in the outer city. I’ll speak to you later about the arrangements, I’m guessing you’ll have a few things you need to do now.”
From the commander’s smile I could see that he was satisfied with the arrangement.
“I’m going to secure the rear to make sure everyone leaves. I’ll see you in the next camping site and by all means pop around for a drink. As for you Shane, I’ll see you in the morning for our sparring session.”
And with that he rode off down the hill followed by his entourage of knights. As they turned to leave, one of the cadets on a horse wave a friendly hand at me. I recognised her as the female cadets that helped us put up the marquee tent the first day. Grenfell noticed my gaze at the friendly cadet and casually said,
“Oh, that’s the cadet that was looking for you.”
“What?”
“She consistently wanted to speak with you, although you were not responding to her for some reason.”
“You never told me it was a woman looking for me!”
“I thought I did. Did I?”
I realised with dread that on the morning I was supposed to meet her the monsters interfered, and I totally forgot about her meeting request. Not only that, but I had been totally ignorant of her obvious interest in me through my stay there. She was the one that always handed me towels or water during my sparring breaks. I didn’t even know her name. I sincerely hoped she didn’t notice the sheepish look on my face at that moment.
The Royal Knights protected our sorry procession of retreating carts, horses, and walking people, by patrolling up and down the long column of people and animals. At least provided a sense of protection for the people. A flood of people filled the entire road pressing us narrowly from all sides.
The scene before us reminded me of the old World War II videos where the refugees left the war-torn cities in long depressing columns. There were some musicians on the side of the road plying a merry tune for the people as they walked past. They played well as a troupe, but I sensed they were not having a lot of effect of people. There were a few people who quickly smiled and nodded as they passed, but they too returned to normal once they moved on. I felt sorry for them, business couldn’t have been too good, but on the other hand I couldn’t fathom why they were there in the first place?
No matter how you looked at it, that was a full-blown retreat and a failure of the highest degree. I had a strange feeling commander Karato would face some stiff opposition from the powers that be when he returned home.
I estimated that for every fighting person, there were three supporting persons. That meant there were at least 15,000 people travelling on that road at that time. We would camp at least twice on our journey to Shimmerstal. I sensed it was going to be a long journey. As we trundled along, I had to ask the question burning in my mind.
“Hey Grenfell. This morning I realised you seemed uneasy about the possibility of going to Shimmerstal, why was that?”
I mean it wasn't rocket science. Travelling on the road to Obon was akin to committing suicide and yet he seemed determined to go that way. It was only once. The commander mentioned it that he changed his mind. If not for that we would probably be heading in the opposite direction.
“My concern was for you.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, going to the capital was nothing short of an adventure for me. He must have realised I wasn't getting the point, so he continued.
“Shane, you have a wonderful gift, but have you ever given thought to how others perceive it?”
“Well I haven't given it much thought. Who exactly are you talking about?”
“I'm talking about those in authority who have the means and the motivation to affect you in ways you may not necessarily want to go.”
I was still confused. Was he saying that those with the power and the money would try to influence me and if that were the case, I could just ignore them, couldn’t I?
It seemed that Grenfell’s family heritage included clairvoyants because he intuitively understood my thoughts.
“Shane, you will not know when masterful people are influencing you. They will imperceptibly change life around you so that you would only think everything was normal. If that doesn’t work, then they will unscrupulously use things like duty, coercion, and debt against you.”
“Why would I want to associate with those bad people?”
“Who said anything about them being bad? They’ll highly likely be people you trust and call your friends. It’s not that they purposely want to undermine you, only that they are doing what they think is best for you and themselves.”
His words rang a large warning bell in my mind. How would I think of living in that world when even my friends could be manipulating me? Although thinking about it, Earth would be no different. I could understand then how honesty, trust and faith played such large parts in good relationships. I couldn’t spend my time constantly checking over my shoulder at my friends to see if they were going to stab me in the back. I placed into my heart the desire to look for people who reciprocated those good qualities in me. Grenfell smiled at my silence and said,
“Despite your best intentions, your skills will stand out to those who care to look hard enough. I’m sure that there are enough aristocratic nobles in the Aryonne kingdom who will soon figure out your skills for themselves. To help you avoid those persons, I’m going to introduce you to some people I trust, I hope you will find them to be good, worthwhile friends.”
I nodded, it wasn’t as if there was no hope to find good people, Grenfell had obviously screened many friend candidates for me from a lifetime of experience. I knew I could trust him because I already understood his motivation, he wasn’t interested in money, power, or glory. There certainly wasn’t an ounce of malice in him, unless he was good at hiding those things and I somehow pegged him totally wrong.
“Consider carefully what you want to do in future and go for that. In that way, there can be few distractions detracting you from your plan.”
Like the insightful saying of an old sage, Grenfell threw me another pearl of wisdom to contemplate. What exactly did I want to achieve in that world? For the rest of that time, he didn’t disturb me further as I mulled over his words. Little did I know that a few days from then, my life would start to change significantly.
Camping that night next to the road was interspersed with the sombre drudgery of travelling on a dusty road filled with defeated looking people. We lost a battle and by looking at these people, I could see they took it rough.