City of Dreams by Beverly Swerling Read Free Book Online Page A

leaving a clean cut, then using a razor to clip the mangled flesh. Finally he dropped the fingers in the wine that was simmering over the fire.
    It was one of Lucas’s distinctions as a practitioner that he used wine the way the ancients had, to wash wounds and to soak bandages before applying them. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but he was convinced that wine often helped the healing. And it really would be more interesting if this girl lived with her fingers sewn back on than if she took his handiwork to an early grave. “Now let’s see about the hand, shall we?”
    Lucas put a piece of board beneath Tamaka’s hand. He strapped it to her arm. “Hold her down,” he told Sally. “If she moves she’s liable to have no hand as well as no fingers.”
    “She won’t move,” Sally said.
    Lucas looked up. “Hold her,” he said. He chose his smallest saw, the one with the finest teeth, and bent over his patient.
    Lucas could make no attempt to reunite the bones or the sinew. All he could do was stitch the fingers back in place and hope nature would somehow nourish them. The books spoke of the body leaking blood into the once-severed part, enough to keep it from turning gangrenous and sending poison through the entire system. The best he could do was create a clean place for the join. He must trim away the damaged flesh and bone on the hand exactly as he had on the fingers.
    He began to saw. Slow, careful strokes, as if he were paring toenails. The girl didn’t move. Lucas lifted his head, glanced at his patient and his sister. Sally’s face was screwed up in a grimace, as if she suffered the child’s pain. Tamaka had not changed her expression.
    A few more minutes, then the sawing was finished. Lucas took his most delicate scalpel and began trimming the shredded flesh. Each time he raised his head and looked at Tamaka she was looking at him. She made no sound.
    “Tough,” Lucas said when he was done preparing for the surgery. “Very tough, your friend. No wonder she and her kind are so hard to get rid of.”
    Sally swallowed her rage. Lucas was simply repeating what he’d heard. “Indian women don’t utter a single cry when they give birth, Lucas. It’s a matter of honor with them. Do you know any white woman who can do the same?”
    “Couldn’t say.” He didn’t look at her. “Birthing’s not my line of country. Get me the stanching powder.”
    She got it and Lucas applied it liberally to the wounded hand. Then he took up the index finger and began to sew. Small, dainty stitches, close together, making an overlap of the skin from the stub of the hand so that there would be strength enough to hold in place the finger that was not attached by bone. It took him nearly four minutes to sew on the first finger. Then he moved on to the second.
    “They’re at least a third shorter than they were,” he said when he was finished. “But that’s her doing, not mine. And she won’t be able to move them, of course.”
    Sally dismissed this with a shake of her head. “That doesn’t matter. It’s missing parts that would make her unacceptable. To the braves.”
    “How nice to know that if she lives, your little friend can make more Indians to come and burn us out.”
    “Tamaka would never do such a thing. Neither would her people. Lucas—she will live, won’t she?”
    “Truthfully?” Sally nodded. “I can’t say. But I’ve done my work carefully and she’s young and strong. I suspect she will.”
    “You’ve done a great thing, Lucas. You and I, we’ll have nothing to fear from the Indians after this.”

A week after the surgery, two of Tamaka’s restored fingers had turned black. “Too bad,” Lucas said. “Still, it was interesting to try.”
    “Lucas, what about Tamaka? If she—”
    “If the black fingers don’t come off, she’ll die. I’ve seen it many times. First the blackened flesh signaling the gangrene. Next the fever. Then death.”
    “And if I can get her to agree, will you take