“I should be taking care of you. I am your feeder,” she said, but her voice held no conviction and her eyes kept moving toward her son.
“So is Likari. Tend to him for now. If I require you, I can send for you.”
“As you wish,” she said with relief, and even before Soldier’s Boy had left the tent, she had moved to Likari’s side.
Soldier’s Boy followed Wurta and her assistants. They took him to a steam hut. It was small and tightly built of branches plastered over with earth. Inside, a big copper kettle boiled over a fire pit. All of them stripped before entering the hut, and once they were inside, with the door shut tight behind them, the heat and steam were close to unbearable. “First,” Wurta told him, “we must open your skin, so that the salve can soak into you.”
This involved him sitting in a chair while heavy cloths were dipped in the boiling water. The feeders allowed them to cool enough so that they could wring them out, and then immediately began to wrap him in them. They were not scalding, but hot enough to be unpleasant. Soldier’s Boy gritted his teeth and endured the treatment. When they removed the cloth, his skin was a bright scarlet by the firelight. His specks showed dark against the redness. The feeders went to work quickly, rubbing the salve into his flesh. As quickly as they covered his skin with the slippery stuff, they wrapped him afresh with the hot steaming cloths. Between the heat and the minty pungency of the salve, he felt giddy. The meal he had just eaten coiled and squirmed in his belly. He began to fervently wish that Olikea were there, to protect him from Kinrove’s feeders.
I agreed with him. “They will kill you with this treatment,” I warned him. “Listen to your heart beating. You can scarcely breathe for the steam and the stink. Tell them to let you go; they’ll have to listen to you. You’re a Great One. You have what you came for; Likari is restored to you. You should leave and take him and Olikea back to the kin-clan. Let us find another way to solve our problem.”
It was getting hard for him to breathe. The air was hot and the pungent aroma of the salve seemed to only make it worse. Yet he said, “I will do whatever I must—”
And the words died on his lips. For the briefest moment, he breathed music, not air. It lifted him weightlessly; he felt himself rise with it, float on it, towed away from the bonds of earth and up into the air.