Book One – Chapter 18

„Bring that stool. Behind you,“ Bubs ordered. “Put it next to you.”

Yu tore his gaze from the shaman, back onto Bubs and the borman, who now padded around the outermost bed behind him. He fetched the stool from there, brought it back and set it down on the tairan’s left side, next to where he had just started and now stood again.

Meanwhile, Bubs unwound the last of the wrappings from the tairan’s limp form and opened the thick white coat. He did not remove it from beneath him or her, only peeled it back far enough to work — From her. She is broken, the borman had said.

Yu stood unmoving, caught between watching and wanting. He desperately needed food. Should he just … go? Slip out and get a bowl? For himself? By himself? It must still be all there, right there, in the big pots.

But no. Better not move without permission. It was better to wait for some sort of acknowledgment, some invitation to speak, or just for the right moment to interrupt.

And then it came.

Bubs stepped down from the stool between the beds and onto the one the borman had placed on the tairan’s left side. As he walked around the bed’s foot end, there was a moment, a flicker, where the mianid’s eyes lifted and glanced in Yu’s direction.

There it was.

The moment was there.

And then it was gone.

And Yu had done nothing.

On the new stool, with his back now turned to Yu, Bubs began unwrapping the layered bands of cloth coiled tight around the tairan’s right leg, above her trousers. The limb beneath was twisted, badly. The angle was wrong. Cloth and frayed cord had secured a crude makeshift splint cobbled together from thin metal rods — tent poles, by the look of them. Bubs removed them one by one. His spindly fingers worked fast, unfastening the bindings and taking out the rods with a precision that showed great caution yet left no time wasted, while simultaneously slipping fresh towels beneath the leg for support.