“You are injured,” he said, disentangling himself from her.
“’Tis only a scratch,” she replied. But the pain when she touched her injured scalp was sharp, and her hand when she brought it away and examined it beneath Phobos’s dim light was black with blood.
Michael brought his handkerchief from his thukhong pocket and pressed it against the wound, causing Arabella to draw in a hissing breath through her teeth. “Lie still,” he said, his voice quite serious.
“Is it very bad, then?”
He made no reply, but as she lay on the cool sand, her breath fogging the air and the perspiration chilling on her face, she felt something seeping through her hair and dripping steadily from the lower edge of her ear, and the iron smell of blood was strong in the air. Michael’s jaw tightened, and he pressed harder with the handkerchief; Arabella’s breath came shallow, and she determined not to cry out from the pain.
And then Khema appeared, slipping silently from the shadows, the subtle facets of her eyes reflecting in the starlight. She had, of course, been watching them all along, unobserved; her capabilities of tracking and concealment were far beyond any thing Arabella or Michael could even begin to approach. “You leapt too late, tutukha,” she said. A tutukha was a small inoffensive herbivore, and Khema often called her this as a pet name.
“I will do better next time, itkhalya,” Arabella replied through gritted teeth.
“I am certain you will.”
Michael looked up at Khema, his eyes shining. “It’s not stopping.”
Without a word Khema knelt and inspected the wound, her eye-stalks bending close and the hard cool carapace of her pointed fingertips delicately teasing the matted hair aside. Arabella bit her lip hard; she would not cry.
“This is beyond my skills,” Khema said at last, sitting back on her haunches. “You require a human physician.”
At that Arabella did cry out. “No!” she exclaimed, clutching at her itkhalya’s sleeve. “We cannot! Mother will be furious!”
“We will endeavor to keep this from her.”
*
The pain of Dr. Fellowes’s needle as it stitched the wound shut was no worse than the humiliation Arabella felt as she lay on a cot in her father’s office. From the shelf above Father’s desk, his collection of small automata looked down in judgement: the scribe, the glockenspiel player, and especially the dancer, still given pride of place though it no longer functioned, all seemed to regard her with disappointment in their painted eyes.
Her father too, she knew, must be horribly disappointed in her, though his face with its high forehead and shock of gray hair showed more concern than dissatisfaction. Though no tears had fallen, his eyes glimmered in the flickering lamplight, and when she considered how she had let him down Arabella felt a hot sting of shame in her own eyes.
Even the crude little drummer she herself had built, a simple clockwork with just one motion, seemed let down by its creator. She had been so proud when she had presented it to Father on his birthday last year and he had placed it on the shelf with his most treasured possessions; now, she felt sure, he would surely retire it to some dark corner.
Again and again the needle stabbed Arabella’s scalp; the repeated tug and soft hiss of the thread passing through her skin seemed to go on and on. “A little more light, please,” the doctor said, and Khema adjusted the wick on the lamp. “Not much longer.” The doctor’s clothing smelled of dust and leather, and the sweat of the huresh on which Michael had fetched him from his home. Michael himself looked on from behind him, his sandy hair and heart-shaped face so very like her own, his blue eyes filled with worry.
“There now,” said the doctor, clipping off the thread. “All finished.” Khema brought him a washbasin, and as he cleaned the blood from his hands he said, “Scalp wounds do bleed quite frightfully, but the actual danger is slight; if you keep the wound clean it should heal up nicely. And even if there should be a scar, it will be hidden by your hair.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Arabella said, sitting up and examining his work in the window-glass—the sun would rise soon, but the sky was still dark enough to give a good reflection. Her appearance, she was forced to acknowledge, was quite shocking, with dried blood everywhere, but she thought that once she had cleaned herself she might be able to arrange her hair so as to hide the stitches from her mother.
But that opportunity was denied her, for just at that moment the office door burst open and Mother charged in, still in her night-dress. “Arabella!” she cried. “What has happened to you?”
“She is quite well, Mother,” Michael said. “She only fell and hit her head.”