The Healer’s Touch — “On the Threshold of Healing”
Chapter III/XIV
Read Chapters I and II
The Healer awoke to light and pain. He squinted and tried to assess his situation. He wasn’t dead, not yet at least, so much did the deep weakness and throbbing ache in his shoulder make plain.
Then the memory of the battle collapsed upon him. Again, he relived the arrow, this face, the darkness — the dirty and wet tree. In his mind, he felt once more the boots running over him, men ignoring him over the ecstasy of victory. He first had planned to let the river take him down, but the current hadn’t been strong enough. He couldn’t wait for the enemies to return and finish off the injured who were so unlucky as to survive their wounds long enough. The trees had been his only hope, although he didn’t even know if he’d survive the night in the cold.
He had, as it seemed, but not out of his own strength alone, for the roots above his head, the water around his legs and the darkness had gone. There was light, warmth. He could hear the crackle of fire and smell the scent of wet rock.
It took him a considerable time to adjust his sight to the light. It flooded in from straight ahead with a brightness that it easily could have been a hole in the sky, a glimpse into heaven.
“It’s the snow,” said an unfamiliar voice. Yet it was so barren any feeling the Healer knew it had to belong to the woman who had shot him. “It fell over the last three days and nights. It is almost man-high in many places now.”
As if it had needed her explanation, only now he realized this icy, clean taste of frozen water. The ceiling his eyes were fixed upon was high and of crude rock. He tried to sit up to see the woman, but the pain made him relax his muscles immediately. His heart was beating faster and his breath was demanding.
“I cut out the rest of the shaft,” the woman’s voice said, “cleaned the wound and sewed it shut.” He heard the creaking of wood and then her steps on the ground. When she came into view, it was as if he looked at an old friend. Her face seemed so familiar, even though he had first laid sight on it a couple of days earlier. Dark hair framing a pale face devoid of life. Her lips, cold and grey, those eyes not just blue and cold, but dead, a depth of nothingness.
The Healer took in a sharp breath. What pain did this darkness cover? How much suffering had caused it? He had survived to find out. “You saved me,” he said, his voice rasp and slow. She brought a water skin to his lips and poured water into his mouth. It was cold and made him cough, increasing his pain, but he needed the liquid. He already felt like a dried-up twig.
“I probably killed you.”
“Not yet.”
“I am not a healer. I don’t have medicine. The snow will make it difficult for us to move on and I don’t know if I can find us food for long enough. I fear you will soon yearn for the quick death you weren’t granted.”
“And yet you pulled me out of that hideout.”
She shrugged. “I should have finished you off right then and there.”
“But you didn’t.”
“It was foolish of you to attack us once we had broken through your lines.”
“I couldn’t let the slaughter continue.”
“How did you hope to make a difference? It was a miracle you weren’t hewn down by the soldiers’ swords.”
“I never get injured.”
She lifted a brow in open disbelief. “ Until my arrow found you.”
He nodded, slightly. “What happened to our army?”
“We ground them to dust. You are the last survivor.”
The Healer swallowed. Again, blood, war and death in every step. How could he keep going? How could he muster the strength to push back this wall of darkness pressing down against the world?
She disappeared from his view and came back with a tin cup in her hands, steam evaporated from it into the air. She set it down on a small flat stone beside the Healer and helped him to sit up. He gritted his teeth against the pain and denied himself to scream. “Here,” she said and gave him the cup, “flavorless tea.”
He raised a brow. “Flavorless? Like …” He took a cautious sip. “Heated water, indeed.” He smiled.
Her face suddenly lit up with a smile as well, though as fleeting as an autumn leaf carried away by the wind.
For a second he surveilled the cave she must have dragged him into. A crack in a cliffside, but sufficient to hold the heat of the fire. “Do you have a name?” he asked, trying to start at a different point.
She shook her head and sat down beside him, gazing towards the glistening triangle marking the entrance of the cavern. For a moment, the Healer thought he saw a spark of life glisten in her eyes. “I once had.” She turned her head to him. “Do you?”
Lost and forgotten, “Once,” he answered and almost grinned. Once, yes, once I bore a name. His memory, nevertheless, wasn’t joyous over those days past. I no longer am who I was.
“Thank you for saving me,” he tried anew.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“You did so for a reason,” he said. “I am not here in this shelter because you suddenly felt so guilty for shooting me or so compassionate as to save me for the simple reason of the value of life.”
“Is that so?” she asked, not looking at him.
Had he had the strength to shrug his shoulders, he’d have done so. “Then give me a better reason for why I’m still alive.”
She consented to his logic with a sigh. “You were surprised to be hit by my arrow. Before, you fought with no thought for yourself, jumping into the fray as if you were invincible.”
“I am a healer. I normally heal people and seek neither to injure nor to be injured.”
She turned towards him. “And yet you took the offense — alone.”
The Healer tried to remember. It had been the carnage that had pushed him to the brink. In the darkest hour of the battle, he had stopped being a healer, crossed a threshold, trying to prevent the slaughter by taking up a sword. At least so he’d hoped it would work out. Now that he knew his army was exterminated, he wasn’t so sure anymore.
“I had to stop all this death!”
“Why?” she shot at him.
He pondered for a second. “Because … I am a healer.”
She shook her head. “No, because you believe in something I no longer can.” She turned to him. “Because you believe in life!”
“Isn’t life worth to be preserved?”
“It all ends in death anyways.”
That’s why she came back for me, the Healer understood. He stared outside, the sunlight still intensified by the freshly fallen snow. “You saved me, and because I believe in the value of life, I am in your debt.”
“Thank me when we have made it to safety beyond the mountains. You will have to walk,” she added with a gauging look at his weak figure.
The Healer wasn’t willing to let the subject of her intentions slip. “It seems as if we are going to spend quite some time together then. I will answer your questions if you answer mine.”
Her eyes turned into thin lines. “Questions like what?”
The Healer shrugged and regretted it the instant as his shoulder turned to fire. He frowned and answered, “I want to get to know you, understand you. Otherwise whatever I tell you won’t get through to you. I’d like to know why such a young and beautiful woman like you is so scarred, why she seems so lonely and has joined an army instead of fleeing into more peaceful regions with the love of her life.”
“Don’t mistake me. Yes, I have preserved you because I believe you are able to see something in life. A value that I was blind to even in the days I still believed in it.” She paused. “I will tell you who I am, why I joined the war, but I am not sure if I can share with you who I once was …” she paused, swallowed, but continued, “for I have forgotten those days.”
The Healer nodded. It was a start. “Agreed. Tell me why the arrow that scarred me ended up in your quiver and I will try to explain to you why I still believe in life.”
She stared at him out of these piercing eyes, then turned and gazed into the light again.
