They Can Nearly Talk by Chestnut_pod  

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Chapter 10

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I have been telling solemn stories for a while now — it makes the life of a country leech seem nothing but endless political squabbles and tragedy. Worse, I am making myself out to be a Rúmil figure, a grand thinker on important topics. Really, nothing could be further from the truth, for the limits of my expertise are hard and immediate.

These curbs were driven home to me one day in the spring, when the grass still shone green on the hillsides but the afternoons burned the fog off and revealed the glorious sky. Quildatal and I were enjoying the freshness of the air and foliage while visiting Nissaratë’s sheep for the lambings.

I felt very much at home amongst Nissaratë’s flocks. As a youth on Taniquetil, my own family’s herds grazed between glaciers and rock spires as I followed them with my spear and crook, and I enjoyed the nostalgia evoked by the the bleating ewes and barking sheepdogs on Nissaratë’s windswept patch of coast.

There was interest as well as nostalgia, for lambings are a wonderful puzzle for the animal leech, not unlike those toys of interlocking loops the Noldor give their wee engineers. Twins and triplets are common in sheep, which means upwards of eight to twelve legs ready to tangle and prevent their poor mothers from delivering them safely. Sorting them out is so much easier than straining against a cow or a horse, both in terms of sheer muscle required and the lessened need to dodge flying hooves. Lambs also all come at once, and never in the comfortable byres set up for them by their doting shepherds. During lambing season, all three of us leeches would essentially camp in the sheepish areas of Ránanandë, dashing from fold to fold as the ewes and the lambs demanded.

A knock at the flap of my tent woke me near dawn one day. A piping voice called, “Doctor Heriel, Ammë says the ewes in the top pasture need help!”

Nissaratë’s young daughter was a second reminder of my childhood home. I have no siblings, but an abundance of older and younger cousins, and little Tófanyel was just the right age to remind me of my youngest uncle’s children, underfoot but too winsome to really mind. If I am being honest, it flattered my junior partner’s pride to have her crouched beside me as I worked, peppering me with questions and handing me my instruments.

Indeed, as I crawled out of my tent into the nippy pre-dawn air, Tófanyel had my bag in hand and looked up at me hopefully from inside her enormous sheepskin coat — clearly chosen by Nissaratë to last a decade or so while her daughter grew into it. For a moment I debated whether I wanted to bring the little girl up to the steep, slippery top pasture, where the paths were really more like rainwater ruts and studded with rocks like raisins in feastbread. Sensing my hesitation, Tófanyel widened her eyes and clutched my bag closer, and I relented.

“Come on, then!”

The hike to the top pasture was strenuous, but nothing compared to the escarpments of my youth. I took a rather prideful pleasure in stepping lightly from firm foothold to firm foothold, just as I had learned so long ago. I took the bag from Tófanyel after only a few hundred yards, though she protested. I also insisted she walk ahead of me, so I could steady her if she tripped, for the so-called paths were slick with recent rain, and the stones turned underfoot. We managed well enough, however, and as we reached the summit, Arien finally burst over the Pelóri, sending sunlight spilling down the sides of the distant mountains like the incoming tide.

“Ah! Bright Arien, who re-enacts each day the work of her creation!” Tófanyel and I sang together in slightly ragged chorus, then grinned at each other.

The ewe was huddled in the meager shelter of a large boulder, in sight of a little byre but stubbornly clinging to her preferred spot. Her sides strained, but weakly, and the ewe seemed discouraged. I dropped to my knees in the dew-sodden grass and gestured for Tófanyel to open the bag. She crouched next to me and followed my every movement with bright eyes as I cleansed my hands and arms and delicately inserted my fingers into the ewe’s birth canal.

“Give her head a stroke for me, Tófanyel. Hum a lullaby, if you can put some power in it.” Tófanyel nodded importantly and went to sit by the ewe’s head.

A truly spectacular tangle met my questing hand inside the ewe. Three lambs, I guessed, one breech and the other two put awry by its position. As gently as I could, keeping up a running commentary for Tófanyel, I palpated the ewe’s abdomen in tandem with gentle pressure from the inside the disentangle the breech lamb from its siblings and turn it in the uterus, pausing when contractions came and keeping up an easy traction to keep things in position. It was so much easier than a calving, though I did not say that to Tófanyel. Seemingly sensing that the situation had improved, the ewe bleated and strained with greater intent. Gently, I helped ease the first lamb out of her body.

It was not in the best of shape, thanks to its long struggle, and I cleared the mucous from its muzzle before blowing into its nostrils. A spark of power steadied the thready heartbeat, and after a minute, the lamb opened its eyes and lifted its head.

“That’s it,” I murmured, and helped the unsteady creature to its mother’s teat.

“Doctor Heriel,” Tófanyel whispered, and I turned my attention back to the ewe, who was pushing again with intent. The second and third lambs came easier, hardly landing on the cushion of grass before shaking their tiny white heads and seeking to stand on their shaky limbs. I lifted them over to where their sibling already gave suck, listening to the wonderful bleating of the relieved ewe as she nuzzled and licked her offspring. I saw the afterbirth delivered safely, then sang a song of protection and healing for the ewe. Before Arien was high in the sky, all was well.

Rubbing at my dirty arms with hanks of wet grass, I said to Tófanyel, “Do you see the cobalt bottle in my bag? No, the darker one to its right. Yes. That is a draught of strength I wish to feed the ewe. Will you uncork it for me, please?”

Tófanyel did so with solemn ceremony, then waited as I instructed her to take one dropper’s worth of the liquid inside and very gently hold the ewe’s head while she inserted the dropper into one side of her mouth. Only a little of the draught spilled, and I thought the ewe had swallowed most of it.

“Well done,” I praised her, and Tófanyel beamed in response.

“Let us bring this little family into the byre where they should have been all along,” I said, and together we chivvied the unsteady little lambs and the proud ewe under the roof. There was a small pump of frigid water under the roof, and I washed my arms more thoroughly while Tófanyel cooed at the nursing lambs, their tiny tails wagging like the bird-scare ribbons in the vineyards.

It was time to descend back to the farmhouse, where Nissaratë might send us back out to another ewe in need, but might also have a hearty breakfast waiting for her daughter and the leech. Down the slope, I could see hopeful white wisps of smoke from the chimney. It did look like a steep way down, however.

“Stay behind me on the path, all right, helper-mine?” I said. Tófanyel agreed brightly. Gingerly, I started down the path, testing each lump of rock for soundness before placing my full weight on it. Even an Elf can be caught out by a rockslide, and springtime in the mountains is well known as the most dangerous time for the Vanyar, after the snow has melted and one can no longer run lightly over its white highways but must trust to the unsettled stones it covered. By myself, I likely could have scampered down, but Tófanyel was only a child, her fëa and hröa not yet fully in tune with the world’s song.

She seemed cheerful enough, however, chattering away behind me about other lambings she had seen. I told some stories, pausing occasionally to help lift her over particularly steep drops.

“Do you have to go to Tirion to learn about leeching?” she asked when we were about halfway down the steepest part.

“Not at all,” I replied. “The University of Alqualondë has an excellent course of study, and it is truly the only place if you find you are interested in fish or the beasts of the sea. Or if you still want to go farther afield, but not to Tirion, the University of Valmar is much smaller, but that may simply mean getting more time with the instructors and more individual attention. You would see many more lambings there!”

“Is that where you went?”

I negotiated another tricky part of the path where the rain had worn a gully down the middle, pointing at the safe places for Tófanyel to put her feet.

“No, I never did, although I am from the mountains. My real education began with an apprenticeship during the war to a fine leech of the Nandor, the Green Elves of Beleriand.”

Tófanyel sighed. “Ammë says she does not want me crossing the ocean until I am six hundred years old. It is not fair; my cousin Luinesar went to Valariandë as a war-sailor when they were only two hundred and two.”

That was young enough and more to go to war, by my lights. “When you are six hundred years old, you will be old enough to go wherever you like,” I demurred. “Middle-earth may be much changed by then. It is not like here, where change comes slowly as glaciers.”

“But if I want to make draughts like you, I need to go!” Tófanyel exclaimed, and just as I was about to make a somewhat rash promise to teach her myself, if she grew to six hundred and still wanted to learn, she shrieked almost loudly enough to drown out the grinding sound of a rock dislodging.

She slammed into the backs of my knees, though I was tall enough to grab onto the steep sides of the gully and halt her there, rather than sending both of us skidding down the side of the hill.

“Sh– stars!” I gasped, and as quickly as I dared, turned around to see Tófanyel on her back in the middle of the path, covered in red clay and her right ankle already welling with red blood.

In the way of young children, she seemed shocked by her hurt, as though not yet decided whether it was worth crying about — but my own shocked expression settled it, and her lip began to wobble and tears to well.

“Easy, easy,” I said, crouching and ignoring the rapid beating of my heart in my ears. My first thought upon seeing the blood and the mud had been a terrible inchoate flash of the war, but it had been quickly supplanted by some atavistic cousinly instinct: Ilmarë, I will do anything, just please don’t tell your ammë!

“Little sweeting, that was a hard fall.” I eased her ankle onto my lap, noting with relief that it did not seem to be broken or even sprained, though it was badly scraped all the way from the heel cord to nearly halfway up her calf. How would I know, though? An Elf’s leg is not entirely like a horse’s leg, and perhaps I was missing some obvious sign of injury. Somewhat frantically, I cast about for something to treat it with, thinking wildly that I was a leech, not a healer!

“You are being very brave,” I told her, scrabbling around in my bag for my bottle of clean water. She was, in fact. Although she was crying, she was not outright sobbing, and she held still as I rinsed the red dirt away from her scrapes, though she flinched when I knocked loose some tiny pebbles embedded in the skin. “Wonderful, well done,” I reassured her again, and looked frantically through my bag again for more appropriate remedies.

Healers used iodine on Elves and Men as well as on animals, I thought, though it would stain her skin. I hurriedly diluted some with the rest of the clean water, then doused her scrapes in the solution. Tófanyel started crying harder as it stung her, and I shushed her as gently as I knew how — one could not exactly say the same things to a child as to a sheep.

“Brave girl,” I repeated, chanting it as I wound turnout wraps I kept on hand for clumsy sport horses around the wound. I did not dare sing my songs or charms, for they really were specialized for animals, though like everyone I knew some minor healing chants for sore muscles and the like. Singing through one of those, I tried to get Tófanyel to sing with me to distract her from her tears. It seemed to work, her hiccups subsiding as she sang along.

“That’s it; well done. Can you stand?” I thought that would probably indicate no lasting damage, although I supposed it could also reveal some profound injury a healer would have noticed at a glance. Setting her little jaw, Tófanyel accepted my hand up. She could indeed put weight on the foot, but I saw that her boot rubbed against the scraped skin. Shifting my bag to my back, I scooped up the little girl and held her against my shoulder.

“I think you are just fine, but let us protect that ankle until we are down to your house. Wrap your legs around my waist and put your hurt foot on the outside,” I said.

Tófanyel struggled a little. “What if you fall?” she asked.

“No Vanya has ever fallen on a hillside,” I replied. In fact, it was quicker to bound down with Tófanyel more or less still in my arms, and we approached the farmhouse in a blink. I might have liked it to take longer, in fact — the prospect of telling Nissaratë of her daughter’s injury on my watch was not enticing.

I set Tófanyel (no longer crying, in fact, impressively stony-faced) down on the stoop.

“Hail the house,” I called. “Nissaratë, you are needed at the front.”

A clatter of footsteps heralded Tófanyel’s mother’s arrival from within. A broad woman whom I had seen wrestle a struggling ram to the ground for my attentions, she filled the doorway.

I have been within a quarter mile of a balrog, I reminded myself, before saying, “Tófanyel fell coming down from the top pasture. I am so sorry for my lapse in care; she is not badly hurt, but she broke the skin on her right leg. I treated her as best I could, but I am not a child-healer. Again, I apologize!”

Bowing from the waist, I waited to, perhaps, be wrestled down by the horns like a wayward sheep.

Instead, she sighed gustily. “Oh, poor darling, not again!” she said, and, paying me no mind, crouched down next to her daughter.

“You must watch your feet as you go down the pasture, or stop wiggling out of light-walking practice with Auntie Andasolmë. Show me your leg, then.”

Tófanyel muttered something vaguely protesting, but tugged up her wide trouser leg to display my bandaging. There was a pause. Nissaratë looked at me for the first time.

“Are these wraps like the showjumpers wear?” she asked. Overcome with embarrassment, I bowed almost double and muttered an assent no louder than Tófanyel. When I risked a glance at Nissaratë’s face, I noticed her mouth twitching, though she tried to maintain a stern mien.

“Very creative,” she said, turning back to Tófanyel and beginning to unwind the wrapping. She raised an eyebrow at the brick-colored stain left by the iodine, which I hastened to explain.

“It looks clean, anyway,” she said, before starting in on a healing charm. Surely parents must go to school for their knowledge of such things, for I never learned them!

In front of her mother, Tófanyel put on an even braver face, staring nobly into the hilly distance as Nissaratë ran her hand over the scabbing, then healing, skin of her ankle and calf. The rusty iodine stain stubbornly remained. Nissaratë patted it firmly, then said to Tófanyel, “You are all better; good job listening to Doctor Heriel and coming back here to me. Now go and wash up; Auntie Andasolmë wants you by noon and you have not done your chores.”

With bad grace and several longing looks back at me (standing awkwardly by the doorstep waiting for my dressing-down), Tófanyel passed through the door to the farmhouse and the ever-present duties of a farm child. I turned to face Nissaratë squarely, preparing to meet my fate like a soldier. She gazed back at me, seemingly vaguely puzzled as to why I was still there on her doorstep.

“Was there a problem with the ewe, Doctor Heriel?”

She seemed pleased when I stammered a denial, though no less perplexed. I decided to throw myself on my spear.

“I am so terribly sorry for getting Tófanyel hurt — I ought not to have taken her up that path and should have carried her down to begin with. And the iodine will stain for a week at least,” I finished miserably.

Nissaratë’s mouth twitched again. “Thank you for your concern, Doctor, truly. You cared for her very well and made sure to hurry back to me so I could examine her. That girl scrapes her knees three times a week, though; it is part of being a child! I am sure you did that and worse at her age. All is well.”

“I hope you will please at least accept a lowered bill from us,” I replied, relieved but not entirely sure I could accept such a comprehensive dismissal. Some falling-down was of course natural, but I had felt properly unsettled to see Tófanyel lying there bleeding.

“No farmer can say no to that,” Nissaratë said jovially, and that, I thought, was that.

It was only a week or so later that the white, fluffy tide of lambing receded, leaving me to enjoy my at-home days in Merrilosto. The weekly market arrived on my third day home, and I went out to barter for more ready-made pottery jars for the dispensary, joyfully leaving Alparenë to deal with a curmudgeonly terrier with a toothache. Jars acquired for the exceptionally reasonable cost of a mother-of-pearl pendant earned for confirming an amorous cat was not pregnant, I decided to also purchase some raw wool grease to refill our stocks. Leeching is terribly hard on the hands, with the constant washing and subsequent insertion into hostile environments and washing again, and we three went through the softening grease as though we were sheep ourselves.

Walking to the clothiers’ section, I saw Nissaratë looming over the crowd from a stall selling lambskins. She spotted me at the same moment, and waved me over enthusiastically. Somewhat reluctantly, for I still felt guilty over Tófanyel’s fall, I went to her stall, which she manned with a far slighter woman.

“Doctor Heriel, you come in good time as always. I must show you something. Andasolmë, mind the stall for a breath, would you?”

She let herself out and towed me down an alley towards one of the civic fountains, where a cluster of children were playing with toy ships. A smaller gaggle, however, were enacting some tragic play on the steps of a nearby house. An older alnerwen — all the signs of a long-suffering eldest sibling, I thought — held a limp girl-child in their arms, the dangling limbs and pushed-out tongue belied by constant giggles. As I watched, another younger child waved her arms and made a sound like a laryngitic hawk, while the others called out, “Rockslide, doctor, rockslide!”

The older child, to my horror, cried, “A Vanya never falls in the mountains!” and leapt down the whole staircase, the “dead” girl in their arms shrieking with glee.

I put a hand to my chest. “They could both break their ankles!”

Next to me, Nissaratë chuckled. “But the brave, noble leech Doctor Heriel is a master of little children’s broken ankles, as you can see!”

Vanishing Elves is a common misconception of Men which I had never wished more were true than in that moment — and remember that I have been within a quarter mile of a balrog!

“It was not broken,” I muttered, hiding my face in my hands.

“There now, Doctor,” Nissaratë said in a tone not unlike that which she had used with Tófanyel. “You have made my little leech-to-be’s whole yén. She stole a bottle of iodine from the stillroom to keep painting on her leg stain, so she can show it to all our visitors and tell the story of how she had to go to the horse leech to fix her ankle.”

“Undiluted iodine might irritate her skin,” I tried, but Nissaratë only laughed again, half drowned out by another gleeful squeal from the children on the steps.

In any case, readers: I have decided never to become a parent. It is simply too much for a simple country leech like me.