Doma worked over Len’s left arm with the grim, unspeaking smooth speed of an army surgeon on a winter campaign.
She sat on a low wooden stool beside the zinc table. She used a strip of clean linen dipped in warm boiled water to soak away the dried lime crust and clotted blood that had sealed his sleeve to his skin. When the fabric peeled free with a wet, tearing sound, Len set his teeth against the rim of his wooden tea mug, refusing to make a sound. The eight black horsehair stitches were still intact. But the lower two knots had pulled sideways through the skin during his climb up the manhole rope. That left small, angry red tears that cried clear lymph and dark blood.
“Hold the wrist,” Doma ordered Bram, who stood behind the bench with an unlit copper hand-lamp.
The big court guard laid his heavy, calloused fingers across Len’s sound right forearm. Then he pressed his shoulder down against the table. Doma uncorked an amber glass bottle of zinc carbolic salve. A thick, pale yellow ointment smelling intensely of pine resin, crushed sulfur, and skin-burning lye. She scooped a generous glob onto her wooden spatula and smoothed it directly over the ragged puncture wounds, working the grease into the raw edges of the torn muscle sheath.
