They Can Nearly Talk by Chestnut_pod  

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Chapter 3

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Ránanandë quickly grew used to the sight of me and Quildatal appearing over the gently rolling hills. At first the vintners and shepherds ribbed me for being green, but my enthusiasm for everything that was not chickens soon endeared me to them.

At the same time, I fell in love with the land itself. The mountains of my childhood were beautiful in a way that was almost punishing: great crags, ultramarine distances, drifts of spring wildflowers that echoed the drifts of winter snow. The sheer scarps drove families through the twisting nets of hollows that made the highlands as the soil, the grazing, the rockfall, and the avalanche demanded, while the crystal water and the piercing sky drew the eye and the heart higher.

Ránanandë was quite the opposite. I had arrived in late spring, and the summer spread itself out before me like a picnic blanket laden with ripening grapes, frisking lambs, gangly foals, lingering blossoms, and generously crowned oaks above gilded hills. The people were broad and expansive as their farms, rooted to the places their parents and grandparents knew, tending carefully to their patches of wild wood and neat orchard with generous patience. The glorious weather brightened even the most perplexing cases I was called upon to attend, and limned the easy ones in an aura of extra pleasure.

In those early summer months of my career in Aman, I was amazed at how many easy ones there seemed to be. In Middle-earth, animals and Children alike suffered horribly from diseases entirely unknown to the Blessed Lands. The terrible coughs and sickening infections that clung to wounds simply did not occur here. The Sindarin and Nandorin Elves of Beleriand had concocted wonderful treatments for these ailments and painstakingly taught me every one of them, and they figured not at all in my new life.

Instead, my caseload consisted of injuries, reproductive troubles, the puzzling illnesses where the body seemed to turn against itself, malnutrition in its various guises and ends, parasites (which somehow qualified for lives in Valinor when the minuscule germs that caused strangles did not), and accidental poisonings. At times, it seemed almost relaxing to stitch together a nasty wound or set a broken limb, knowing the putrid specter of infection would not come to trouble my patient.

Then again, there were the puzzles that would never in a millennium have troubled the shores of Middle-earth. Such was the question of Sister Turkanta’s milch goat.

Ránanandë prided itself on its vines and wines, and many of the larger vintners would take small storefronts in the little towns that dotted the county, even if their grapes grew miles away. These served to attract visitors from as far afield as Eressëa and Valmar, to sample the wares and make profound statements about nose and tannins and body, without stirring more than a mile outside their attractive plazas and spas.

Filitambo was one of these towns, an old port on the Russanaira River in the deep redwoods. It specialized in catering to melehesti ever since a group of the Siblings of Eternal Extravagance, devotees of Irmo, took up residence soon after Arien’s first rising. The trees and the silty soil prevented the growing of grapes in the town itself, but they certainly did not prevent the full flowering of attractive vineyard storefronts from beyond the floodplain.

It was to this pretty tourist village that I was called while doing a round just upriver. My circuit of Ránanandë took two weeks, running widdershins from Merrilosto up the Russanaira to Aireresta on the seashore, then down the coast and inland again. The inhabitants knew that if I was within a day’s ride, I would see to emergencies outside my usual loop and stay an extra day in a town to let those with housepets bring them in. The usual procedure was to set up shop in the town hall and wait for people to carry in their cats and rabbits and so on. It was not to be accosted by a Noldorin man wearing more jewelry than cloth and a look of pure panic.

“It’s Sister Turkanta’s goat, Doctor!” he gasped. “I’ve killed her!”

I jumped up from my seat in one of those charming storefronts, where I had arranged myself to advantage. Filitambo saw more melotorni than meletheldi, but enough women of my kind came to drink wine and participate in the melehesti’s yearly rodeo to make my advantage quite advantageous.

This was not apposite in the face of a dead or dying goat, and I hurried to follow the panicked man out of the center of town. On the way, I managed to extract his name — Orneleo — and his situation — that he had whimsically decided to decorate the little tree in his host's front garden with the various gems and chains his friends had left behind to go boating on the river, and managed to get it glittering, only to realize that said host’s nanny goat had followed him into the garden and was munching on the leaves. Orneleo was half-heartedly attempting to dissuade the goat when suddenly she keeled over stiffly and began to choke and paddle her legs. Orneleo noticed that his friend’s shawl with the agate brooch was missing, put two and two together, and burst out in search of the leech he had seen that afternoon from the wineshop.

Such was the situation as I found it, with the addition of a tall, white-painted Sister who could only be Turkanta, humming a mode to keep the goat calm and holding its head down towards its chest to keep the airway open. Whenever she paused for breath, the goat would splay out its legs again, gasping and gurgling in its efforts to swallow and find air. The staff of the small lodging house stood around her, some humming counterpoint, all looking with unfriendly eyes at Orneleo. To his credit, he stood back and let me drop my bag beside the goat and kneel, disinfecting my hands as I did so.

“Can you keep that up?” I asked Sister Turkanta. She nodded without pausing in her mode, and I began to hum myself, a scale from Orvambo to fill in the gaps where she breathed.

I took a Fëanorian lamp from my bag, pried open the goat’s mouth, and looked for evidence of the obstruction. There lay the tongue, still pink but beginning to pale alarmingly. There the entry to the esophagus, whole and unlacerated. There the ribbed windpipe, somehow not visibly occluded.

I broke off my humming and waited for Sister Turkanta to take a breath. The drone of her voice ceased, and the goat choked hard, tongue curling and breath wheezing. With as much force as I dared, I kept her jaws open and stared into her throat, watching the flutter and seizure of the airway. Sister Turkanta began to hum again, and the goat relaxed, though that awful whistle in her breath continued in sinister counterpoint.

Mind racing, I ran a hand down the outside of the goat’s throat, searching for lumps or heat that might indicate an internal wound. There was nothing. Returning my Fëanorian lamp to the goat’s mouth, I stared as I waited for Sister Turkanta to run out of breath again.

This time, I was ready for the goat’s convulsion and kept the light steady. There—

Gleaming in the fleshy dimness of the epiglottis was the tiniest sparkle of a gemstone, more like a pin than a brooch, suspended from a silken red fringe emerging from the esophagus. As the goat gagged against the cloth, the contraction of the muscle made it bounce into the windpipe, where her desperate attempts to suck in air only held the stone fast. When Turkanta began her mode again, the forcible relaxation of the goat’s muscles allowed the stone to fall away, back towards the stomach and invisibility, until her gagging brought it back up, and the cycle replayed.

It was not a pretty sight. It seemed I would have to catch that tiny cabochon, now coated with spit and mucus, right as it sprang back out of the stomach, without dislodging it and sending it properly down the windpipe. Drawing the sash back out of the stomach would be nothing compared to that trick.

Ilmarë, I thought to myself.

For the first time, I looked up at my audience. The staff, all Lindar, had circled around Sister Turkanta to stand between us and Orneleo, who stood by the tree wringing his beringed hands.

“Who here has a steady grip?” I asked Sister Turkanta. Without breaking her mode, which was beginning to grow slightly ragged, she nodded her head to an alnerwen in a cook’s apron.

“Thank you. Please, come here and hold the mouth open wide, like this.” I demonstrated my grasp on the goat’s upper and lower jaws. “Do not readjust and do not lean in; I will have my own hand inside and need space. She might struggle, but you will not hurt her worse than if she suffocates, so hold her firmly.”

The cook nodded, their eyes wide but their chin set. I looked to Sister Turkanta next.

“I am going to count down from four, and on zero, you should stop humming entirely, pick up the knife from where I rest it, and hold it out to me.”

Sister Turkanta nodded, and I signaled that the cook should assume their position. I reached into my bag and took out one of the small, sharply hooked knives Elquessë and I used for autopsies. I made sure the cook’s hands were secure and would not slip, then began to count.

On four, I slid my right hand, as steady as I could make it, into the goat’s throat. On two, I angled the Fëanorian lamp so it cast a steady light that would make the agate glitter. On zero, Sister Turkanta ceased her song, and the goat gagged again, striking out with her legs. One of her sharp cloven hooves grazed me in the thigh, but I ignored the sting. The cook, with their strong bread-kneading arms, kept the goat’s head steady, and I moved the lamp from side to side, searching for that gleam.

There it was. The little pin popped out of the esophagus, still mercifully tangled in the fringe. As quickly as I dared, I pinched it between my fingers, then dropped the Fëanorian lamp and held out my left hand for the knife. Sister Turkanta was at the ready, and I sliced through the fringe. The agate fell into my hand, and I withdrew before I could drop the slippery thing down the wrong pipe. Instead, I dropped it on the ground, then reached back into the goat’s mouth for the shawl. The goat, still struggling and retching, was nonetheless breathing easier, that dreadful whistle gone.

Carefully – indeed, agonizingly slowly – I pulled the silk out of the esophagus inch by inch. Eventually, the goat gagged hard, and the last of the fabric, and a horrible quantity of other material, emerged of its own volition.

I sat down from my crouch on the groundcover and barely refrained from lying all the way down.

“That is all of it, I think,” I said, then looked past the screen of lodging-house staff to where Orneleo looked rather faint. “Is this everything? Was there any more to it?”

Silently, he shook his head, then nodded, then found his words and said, unsteadily, “That was all.”

Reassured, I turned back to the poor goat, still lying on her side in a way that anyone familiar with goats would find immensely distressing. The cook was still kneeling by her head, and after I cleaned my hands a third time, I asked them to open her mouth again. There were no wounds, so far as I could see by the light of my lamp — perhaps Ilmarë really had been listening — but the whole entrance to the esophagus was inflamed from the friction of the fabric and the tissues of her mouth were slightly swollen.

“All right.” I stood. “There does not seem to be any lasting damage. You were very, very lucky,” I said to Orneleo. “If that pin had come off the shawl, or pierced anything, that goat would be dead.”

Sister Turkanta, who had still not yet said a word, rose and unflinchingly shook my hand, still slimed with goat spit. When she did speak, her voice was deep and even, but threaded through with tension.

“Thank you a hundred times, doctor.” She pressed my hand again, the paint on her face making her expression seem all the more intense. “Will she be all right? Is there more to be done?”

“Her throat is irritated and swollen,” I replied. “It is nothing life-threatening, but it is surely painful, and she will have a difficult time eating forage or hard scraps. If I may, I would like to use your kitchen to make a decoction to numb the inflammation and speed healing.”

Sister Turkanta nodded briskly and placed a hand on the cook’s shoulder. She turned to Orneleo, and I think only I saw the flash of suppressed anger in her eyes, quickly buried.

“Brother,” she said. “You will be paying this leech from your own pocket, and you will take your finery down from my tree at once.” Her tone was calm, but it brooked no argument — not that Orneleo looked likely to proffer any.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “I am so sorry! I did not expect—”

I shook my head. “You should always be careful around animals, especially clever and curious ones. When I return with the decoction, we can discuss payment. For now, I would like to prepare it as quickly as possible.”

Sister Turkanta swept me into the half-subterranean kitchen, cool despite the cookfire in the southern wall. Preparations were underway for a large meal, but the cook cleared me a space near the butter churn and set the herbs at my disposal. Sister Turkanta leaned against the counter beside me and sighed.

I eyed her while I mashed fresh mint and dried kingsfoil together.

“Sister,” I began tentatively, “Will you sing a little soothing into the herbs? A devotee of the Sleeping One must surely have a greater power than I in this area.”

Sister Turkanta tugged her ear, then grimaced as her face powder came off on her fingers. One of the cook’s assistants, edging past with a tray of loaves, handed her a cloth.

“I do not feel soothed,” she said. “It was a silly occurrence; I will laugh about it tomorrow.”

I scraped the sides of the mortar and added salt. Sister Turkanta watched the motion of the pestle and sighed.

“If that sparkly young fool had killed my goat, Filitambo would have thrown his whole group out on their ears and probably sent a complaint to King Olwë. I can see the broadsheets – ‘Noldo kills Irmoan votary’s beloved pet with agate stone.’ ‘Meletorno refuses shelter to young Noldorin pleasure-seeker after boardinghouse accident.’”

Dipping a pinky into the mixture, I tasted it and decanted it into a pitcher of water with honey.

“I am glad we could avoid that,” I said, unsure of what else to say. The Vanyar were little accustomed to the currents of resentment that still flowed between Tirion and Alqualondë, and Lindar did not come to Tirion for tourism.

“Let this steep for twenty minutes, then strain out the herbs, ice it until it is cold, and feed it to the goat while singing the same rhyme you might use for your own throat after a concert. I will leave the recipe, in case she still seems sore tomorrow.”

Sister Turkanta nodded, and I felt certain she would follow my instructions to the letter. Dreamy Irmo might be, but his melehesti devotees could not afford to be so.

We walked back out into the summer sunshine, where Orneleo wrung his hands next to the hastily denuded tree.

“Please accept this for your troubles, Doctor,” he said, and held out a handsome enameled pendant in the shape of a comet on a gold chain. “I thought you might like to keep the agate, too; my friend will not mind when he hears of the trouble it caused.”

I smiled at him and accepted the (cleaned) jewelry, which I could easily trade in Alqualondë on my next day off. Orneleo then turned to Sister Turkanta, inhaling deeply.

“Sister,” he said, “I beg your pardon for my carelessness. I am not used to farm animals being loose, and so almost caused a great injury. I understand if you would rather I find other lodgings. Regardless, please accept this on top of my fee.”

So saying, he held out a lovely, deep-colored amethyst carved into a simple ring — purple being the color of Irmo and his worshippers.

Sister Turkanta looked surprised, then touched, beneath the face paint.

“Thank you for your apology, Orneleo,” she said. “I appreciate your thoughtfulness, and I know you did not intend any harm. Please do stay out the rest of your holiday here, though I ask you leave the garden alone.” She looked at the ring, wistfully, I thought. However, she continued, “There is no need for an extra gift.”

For the first time, Orneleo smiled, and I thought I saw a glimpse of a wicked charm. “But Sister,” he said, “It suits your lip-color so well. Won’t it bring out those nice blue undertones in your eyes too?”

Sister Turkanta laughed, and I turned to the goat, smiling. It seemed any crisis had been averted, and my patient was resting on her chest, breathing normally, looking around with some of her natural caprine curiosity. Unless it got her into any further scrapes with gemstones, I thought the whole household would do quite well.