Pagan Siege (Tribes of Britain Book 5) by Sam Taw (10 best novels of all time TXT) 📕

was sharper and easier for me to handle than Tallack’s dagger. After a quick blessing from Endelyn, I took hold of the shaft in one hand and braced his ribs with my other. “This will hurt. Try not to move.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I yanked with all my strength.

The warrior wailed loud enough to summon spirits from the Underworld. I had to work fast or he was set to join them there. Blood gushed in great spurts, hot and bubbling. It told me that he’d punctured the bag of humours sitting under the lungs. Try as I might, I couldn’t get my fingers inside the hole to find the fissure. A quick nick with Kewri’s knife gave me more room, but the cavity was filling up fast and obscuring my view.

Red bubbles fizzed about his mouth and he struggled to breathe. A shattered rib must have sliced through his lung too. All about me the crowd went silent as the warrior’s life ebbed away before our eyes. I had just one chance to save him. I plunged my fingertips inside his chest and felt about in the soft innards. Poking my finger under his ribs, I located the hole in the blood bag.  I pinched the two sides of the gap together between thumb and forefinger and the flow lessened. Holding tight I screamed at Kewri. “Get me a jug of salted water and all my clean cloth from my kit.”

For such a big man, Kewri was remarkably nimble. He stood at my side, jug in one hand and rags in the other, awaiting my directions. I couldn’t afford to let go for one moment. Pouring just a splash at a time, Kewri flushed and dabbed until the innards were as clean as we could get them. My knuckles were white with the pressure of holding his entrails together through the narrow gash in his side. I squeezed so tightly; the poor man passed out from the pain. Those around me gasped, thinking it was all over and that the man had fallen into the arms of Cernonnus. I knew better. His chest still rose and fell, albeit too quickly for my liking.

Vina threaded the fibres of back strap through my bone needle and handed it to me. It was a fiddly job, but a few over stitches were all it took to secure the hole in the blood bag. Whether he would survive having lost so much fluid was another matter. I closed his skin as fast as I was able, not caring about my messy stitching. When I had finished, I looked down at my tunic. It was drenched in the warrior’s humours. So too were my hands. I even had dried globs of the stuff on my chin.

The crowd waited for me to speak. I knew he would not last out the night, but that was not what they wanted to hear. His parents and siblings were trembling at the front of the group, their hands clasped together in anguish.

Facing them, I looked directly at the warrior’s mother. “I have done all I can, the rest is in the hands of the goddess. May she bless him and restore his vigour so that his mother may hold him again.” The poor woman understood all and crumbled into her husband’s arms. Endelyn stepped forwards with her coloured clays and paints and daubed a smudge of ochre on each of the foreheads of his family.

She was gifted at exploiting people’s attention. Normally, I would have scoffed and wandered away from her antics, but this day I was glad of the distraction. Death was hard for me to reconcile. Grief was too close to the surface for me to cope with anymore. I slipped away to the stream to wash myself, ridding my skin of the dying man’s blood. There was not much I could do about my tunic. After a quick change back in my hut, I left the cloth to soak out the stains and returned to my patient.

Tallack was standing near to the door watching the elders and their family’s response to Endelyn’s rituals and chants. She summoned just about every god in living memory and asked each and every one of them for their favour, throwing her head back and babbling the way she always did when she was pretending to converse in gods’ speak. The crowd lapped up her fervour with metals and jewels thrown at her feet in offering, as though they could buy the life of the warrior through the priestess.

I turned to my nephew. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to make her the Ruvane?” It was a risky question, given his terse warning back in his hut to mind my own business. It seemed such a drastic step to give a priestess such power over the tribe.

“Of course, it is. She’s lovely. Look at how the tribal elders adore her. She soothes them after troubles and we’ve had more than our fair share of those recently. Look how she dealt with the whole Blydh incident. I’d say she possessed remarkable maturity. She’ll make a fine Ruvane.”

I’d seen these blind infatuations of Tallack’s before. His judgement of character was worse than mine. His love for a Phoenician Prince did not end well, and this decision gave me an ache in my belly; a sense of foreboding that I couldn’t quite define. We watched them for a while, the elders and their wives kneeling in adoration with Endelyn prancing about in her thin tunic holding them in thrall.

Senara stood near to the priestess, guarding her with pride, the puppy on a leash at her side. I knew that the shield maiden was bright, but I didn’t realise her skill in manipulation. In a short space of time, she had earned my trust, broken Kewri’s heart after claiming deep affection for the giant, and now stood to become the most trusted adviser to the next Ruvane. I couldn’t