Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Peace in the Valley

“Asylum?” he asked.

“Alyssum,” her voice answered, laughing. “Sweet alyssum. It’s a flower.”

He was lying on the mountainside, every sinew and joint aching. Somewhere half a mile above was the civilized comfort of the clinic. He was mired like the Cowardly Lion in a field of flowers, his legs weighted by plaster casts.

If he hadn’t been a mountain climber before, he damn sure was now. His chest heaved for air, and his shoulders and arms shook from using the metal crutches as pitons to dig into the tough sod and pull his plaster-weighted legs behind him.

She wafted the small blossom under his nose again. “I need to get to one of these high mountain farmsteads. Ask for food, beer, a saw.”

“Not water?”

“Beer is water here. I need a road.” She sat up to eye a snake of paved darkness twisting up the Alps, and sighed. “I need a reason to say I’m stranded. I’ll probably have to trek back a gallon of unneeded petrol.”

She stood, shaking out her chic suit. She looked like someone stranded. “I’ll get you out of those casts. You think you can put weight on your legs again?”

“I’ll have to.”

“You Americans. Always what must be done. Never what is pleasant to be done.”

He thought on that parting remark long after the hip-high grasses and knee-high flowers had swallowed her pink-suited figure.

Here, he was truly helpless, his body anchored by the means of its recovery. Yet his mind soared like the distant clouds. He rubbed his left inner elbow. He still smelled the acrid rubbing alcohol scent, felt the ting of the hypodermic needle tip tasting his vein, as a serpent smells, with the bitter end of its toxic tongue.

Death rode on that thin, hollow steel reed; he knew it. His death.

This woman had interrupted that, and by duplicitous means had wafted him away from the clinic, from his would-be killer and also from the only man he trusted.

That made her the only woman he trusted.

That made trust a necessity rather than an option.

He knew this Max person he was didn’t like necessity as a partner.

He inhaled the heady scent of mountain wildflowers. Their only escape route had been on foot. For now, he was helpless and, rid of the leg casts, might be more helpless still. Yet his mind was working, weighing. His mind wouldn’t let him sink into complacency.

Complacency. “The refuge of the inferior mind.”

That motto rang true, like history. He’d been warned against complacency. Over and over again.

Twilight was falling on the valley below before she returned.

“Did you think I wasn’t coming back?” she asked.

“I didn’t think. That’s the advantage of being an invalid.”

“I deliberately stopped us by this haymow. It’ll be as cozy as an inn. But, first—”

She knelt in the long grass, the action releasing the scent of crushed wildflowers as he lay back on his elbows.

“They had a saw.”

He viewed the sturdy, ragged edge of a small, hand-size hacksaw and winced.

“I’ve only time to do one cast before the light fades. You were due to have them removed two days from now anyway. Think you can bear an early exodus?”

Her language was quaint, laughable. Exodus. “Saw away. If you hit skin, you’ll know.”

Still, he steeled himself, feeling the hard-edged plaster rocking back and forth as she sawed. She knew where the seam lay, and attacked the cast on his right leg top and bottom, then pulled, then sawed . . . finally the cast opened like an almond shell. Two halves, clean. The setting sun made the revealed white skin of a man’s leg glow in its angled rays. The dying light revealed a horrifying degree of muscle waste in a mere six weeks.

“Ye gods,” he murmured, “it’s so pink and puckered and ghastly.”

There was a silence.

“My leg,” he said firmly.