Where the Wind Takes Us
In addition to her and Jiguro, the caravan had hired on other guards. Three of them died in the attack; Balsa remembered seeing their bodies on the ground, unmoving. She never found out what had happened to the other guards.
Lost in her memory, Balsa watched the bandits keep coming in overwhelming numbers. If Balsa and Jiguro didn’t flee, they would die.
Balsa caught sight of Jiguro farther ahead of her, holding his own against the bandits in the road. The land sloped gently downhill. Balsa ran to Jiguro without thinking; she only realized later that rushing headlong toward him made her a prime target for the enemy archers.
Suddenly, a piercing pain shot through Balsa’s right leg, and it went out from under her. She landed on her back and rolled to her side. There was an arrow sticking out of her right thigh.
She didn’t remember much of what happened immediately after that. She remembered praying for Jiguro to save her, and he had, but until that moment, she’d crawled around the battlefield in a haze of sweat and blood.
She’d lost her spear when the archer made her fall. Balsa had nothing but the broken arrow in her hand when the next bandit faced her with his weapon. She got in close before he could strike her and shoved the splintered arrow into his gut.
After that, Balsa was barehanded and injured on a battlefield. She froze again, not sure what to do...
Then her body took over. Sights, sounds, and smells reached her as if through a fog as she dodged opponents and searched the blood-soaked battlefield for a weapon. She found her spear again, but it was too hard for her to carry it and stand at the same time, so she crawled along the ground like a brown bear cub seeking its mother, tripping who she could and rolling to avoid blows.
Balsa’s breathing was too loud in her own ears. Her lungs felt like they were on fire, and there was still blood in her eyes from when it had sprayed at her earlier. The spear she was dragging along felt indescribably heavy.
A hand seized Balsa’s shoulder and spun her around. A bandit was about to skewer her with his own spear; she brought her weapon up with both arms and used it to protect her stomach. He was so strong that she lost her grip--
--and then another man came up behind her attacker, smacking him across the head with his spear. He was saying something, but Balsa couldn’t make out words. She had to look at his mouth to understand him.
“Balsa, it’s me!” Jiguro called out.
No one else was moving. She and Jiguro faced one another as she struggled to get her breathing under control.
Jiguro crouched down next to her. “It’s over,” he said. “It’s done.”
As the idea that she was finally safe sank in, Balsa’s vision went dark at the edges. Jiguro shook her shoulders. “Balsa, stay awake. You can’t pass out. Not yet. Pull yourself together!”
The shaking restored Balsa’s awareness, but it also hurt. She set her jaw and nodded.
Jiguro placed Balsa’s left arm around his neck and helped support her as they walked. The arrow wound in Balsa’s leg sent shooting pain through her entire body at every step.
Some of the bandits they passed were still alive, though none of them were in any shape to fight. Balsa and Jiguro kept walking downhill back to the road toward the ravine. That was where the caravan wagons were, but
Jiguro and Balsa walked past the caravan wagons and made their way carefully to the riverbed at the bottom of a ravine.
***
The air swirled around Balsa, red and stinking of blood and gore. The Sadan Taram were still singing. Balsa had lost all track of time.
After Jiguro had gotten Balsa to the ravine, they’d been discovered by a group of Sadan Taram. Balsa remembered what Jiguro had said to them, once again lost in memory.
“I’m not hurt,” Jiguro said quietly. “This blood belongs to the people who attacked us. My daughter took an arrow in the leg. I don’t know how deep the wound is.”
The doctor probed the edges of Balsa’s wound, making her sit up with a start.
“It’s deep, but it’s not too bad. I’m not hurt otherwise.” Balsa said this, but neither Jiguro nor the doctor reacted. Was her voice that quiet? Balsa forced her eyes open and looked at the doctor.
It was a woman. Balsa hadn’t expected that. She looked into the woman’s deep brown eyes and felt her curiosity and concern. She was beautiful, with dark hair and pale skin. She held a length of silk in her hand that looked like a bandage: it was all wadded up.
“It’s dangerous for you two to be alone in the woods with this injury,” the doctor said primly. “But the nearest inn is two days’ journey. Hmm...”
The doctor turned and faced several other women standing a little way behind her in the trees. Their clothing was bright and colorful, and they were carrying instruments like flutes and drums. Traveling musicians, maybe?
“We’ll stay here tonight, if that’s all right,” Jiguro said. “Would you prepare a tent for us? We’ll pay you for the trouble.”
Commotion among the musicians. “We can’t stop here. We won’t make our concert in Aharan tomorrow if we do.” They were all appealing to the doctor, who seemed to be their leader.
Jiguro listened to their complaints, then said, “Leader of the Sadan Taram, please don’t concern yourselves with us. Thank you for your consideration. Please be on your way.”
“But...”
Jiguro put up his hand so that the woman wouldn’t protest. “If you have a little time and resources to spare, I’ll pay you for some food and medicine.”
The woman narrowed her eyes, then nodded. “Of course we’ll give you food and medicine. There’s no need to pay us.”
Jiguro tried to pay anyway, and the woman’s face became stern. “Now, now,” she said. “We have a reputation to uphold, good sir. What would people say of us if we charged a man for medicine to tend to his sick daughter?”
The other women nodded; a few smiled.
Jiguro shrugged helplessly. “Well, then. I thank you ladies kindly for your compassion.”
More smiles; a few giggles. A manservant fetched supplies for Jiguro and Balsa while the women gathered firewood from the forest. They built a fire and boiled water for a medicinal tea to give to Balsa.
“Fetch more water,” the leader/doctor said. “This girl has lost a lot of blood. She needs more water if she’s going to feel better.”
Jiguro shook his head. “I’ll take care of that. You’ve done more than enough for us. Please be on your way.”
“But we--”
“--I’m fine,” Balsa said, cutting in before Jiguro could say anything. “I lost some blood, but I won’t die. I should be well enough to walk to the river myself by morning.”
The woman stared at Balsa for a while with her eyes wide and her head tilted, like she was trying to figure out what Balsa was thinking. She shrugged, then smiled. She gave orders for departure, and she and the other musicians packed their things in a wagon and headed for the road.
Before she left, the woman faced Balsa and Jiguro one last time with a bright smile. “The next time we meet, let’s share a full meal and drink together.”
Jiguro bowed his head deeply. “Yes. I’ll treat you and your musicians to whatever you would like in repayment of your kindness.”
Balsa tried to get up and bow, too, but her limbs felt as heavy as lead.
She woman waved to Balsa, bowed, and then followed her companions into the trees. The world around was much more still and quiet with them gone.
“I saw that you broke the arrowhead,” Jiguro said. “I have to pull out the shaft now.”
Balsa focused her attention on Jiguro. He examined her wound in the light of the fire with a critical expression. “The good news is that it missed the major blood vessels...”
Jiguro made a better tourniquet for Balsa’s leg with twine, tying it so tight that it hurt. He gave Balsa alcohol to drink in the hope that it might dull her senses to the pain. It was so strong that it burned the back of her throat as she swallowed it and kept burning as it went down, spreading heat to her entire body.
“We need something for you to bite,” Jiguro muttered.
Balsa’s eyes lit on the length of silk that the woman had left next to her bedroll. When it was all wadded up, it would be cleaner and softer than a stick.
Jiguro noticed the silk as well and put it carefully in her mouth. Then he poured all the remaining alcohol in his jug onto Balsa’s wound. Balsa writhed and groaned as the agony of disinfection warred with the sharp piercing pain of her injury.
It was difficult to remove the shaft at this stage because she’d broken off the arrowhead before, and her flesh had constricted around the wood. Jiguro tried to yank out what little of the shaft he could grab until sweat stood out on his forehead, but he couldn’t budge the splintering wood so much as an inch. He paused often to pour hot water with herbs in it onto her leg to keep the area clean, but Balsa barely noticed. Her perception shrank to include her pain and nothing else. She wept bitter tears more than once before Jiguro finally managed to ease the first piece of the shaft out, then the next, bit by slow bit.
When he was finally done, Jiguro bandaged the wound, and Balsa spat out the wad of silk in her mouth. “You’re a butcher.”
Jiguro snorted. “You’re welcome,” he said wearily. “Next time, don’t freeze in the middle of a battlefield and get yourself shot.”
So Jiguro had been watching her. He’d been watching her the whole time. She glanced down at her bandage, which was nearly soaked through, and closed her eyes. She really should have guessed that he’d been keeping an eye on her.
Jiguro set up nets in the trees around them like he was planning to catch birds, but Balsa thought he probably had a different purpose. They had to be alert to many threats here. Nets wouldn’t kill any enemies that stumbled on their camp, but they would slow them down.
He kept wandering around the camp further and further afield until Balsa couldn’t see him anymore. He often left her alone at camp to hunt or gather wood, so she didn’t worry at first, but when he was gone for hours, anxiety gnawed at her gut. She was hurt and still needed help. She couldn’t defend herself like this. Where had he gone?
Balsa slept fitfully. Every time she awoke, she scanned the trees around the camp looking for Jiguro, but he didn’t come back all night. The sun was high in the sky by the time he returned.
He was carrying water in a leather satchel that the musicians had left food in for them the night before. It was completely full of water, and Jiguro sat with her to help her drink it. The water tasted faintly of leather, but was so cool and refreshing that she gulped it down eagerly.
After she’d drunk her fill, Jiguro took up a clean rag and started washing the blood off of her face and hands.
“I can do that,” Balsa said irritably.
Jiguro kept cleaning her face as if he hadn’t heard her. She tried to take the rag, but she couldn’t grip it easily. She glared at Jiguro, showing her displeasure plainly.
She couldn’t tell what Jiguro was thinking. His expression was blank and his eyes were on her hands, not her face.
Balsa closed her eyes. She wanted to be better five minutes ago.
***
Kii ceased her singing, and the other Sadan Taram started building up the fire again and getting ready for bed. Balsa was no longer so lost in her own thoughts that she couldn’t pay attention to her surroundings, but her mind kept drifting back to that terrible day--the day that she’d met the Sadan Taram for the first time.
These people are nothing but a nuisance, she thought. Balsa knew that she was no longer as weak or as impulsive as she’d been as a girl, but the effect of the Sadan Taram’s song made her feel like the experience had happened recently.
Balsa smiled bitterly. After that attack, she had found the man who’d betrayed the caravan and tried to take him on one-on-one. He’d laid a trap for her that almost killed her, again--and again, Jiguro had stepped in to save her.
But Jiguro had never seen things that way.
You think you owe me a debt. You don’t. Get that ridiculous idea out of your head.
Even though she was a stupid kid who always needed saving, Jiguro never resented her for it. She hadn’t understood that until much later in life.
Dad…
Balsa stared into the fire, seeing Jiguro pass her a shelled walnut to eat after she’d nearly died in her stupid fight against the caravan guard who’d betrayed them in her mind’s eye. She wondered if Jiguro ever had doubts. She’d never asked him about that. She’d asked him about regrets, but growing up was a turbulent experience for her. It never occurred to her teenage self to wonder if he thought of himself as a bad parent, or if he would have done some things differently.
Whenever Balsa was injured, Jiguro would take her to Torogai and Tanda’s hut in the mountains until she recovered. A smile tugged at her lips. After nearly dying not once but twice, she and Jiguro had spent the entire spring season there.
Balsa wasn’t a woman who liked to rely on other people, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew that she owed Torogai and Tanda her life several times over. What would I do without them?
What would Jiguro have done? Would either one of them have survived? Balsa didn’t want to think about that.
The moon set, leaving the world in total darkness. Sansa and the other Sadan Taram were already asleep and breathing heavily.
It looks like I won’t be going home to Tanda this year, Balsa thought regretfully. She’d be connecting with a caravan headed to Toluan after this. Backtracking to Toluan wouldn’t give her enough time to cross the mountains before the season changed to winter.
Life is a strange thing. Balsa pondered the nature of her relationships and the arc of her life so far. She was on guard, so she couldn’t sleep. As the wind sighed around her, Balsa kept herself awake with thoughts of the past.
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