“Hold his upper-arm artery against the upper arm bone for three more beats, Ilyra,” Seyun said. His voice dropped into the calm, steady, unrushed pace he and Mina had used in a dozen roadside ditches since leaving Oran. He didn’t waste breath lamenting the cut hand lying beneath the two-ton granite top door beam block four paces behind them. The cooper—a broad-shouldered man named Tarn from Miller’s Ford—was gray-faced and shivering wildly as shock set in, his pregnant wife kneeling in the mud beside his left shoulder keeping his head in her lap.
Working with his scarred fingers despite the dull ache in his braced fifth rib, Seyun looped a two-inch strip of boiled linen twice around Tarn’s upper forearm, three finger-widths above the crushed wrist joint. He slipped a six-inch ash toggle stick into the knot, twisted it four half-turns until the bright blood spurting slowed to a dark-blood ooze. Then he locked the toggle under a backup tie.
Unstoppering the small horn vial of sterilized reed-ash and dried yarrow powder Mina insisted he carry in his inner breast pocket, Seyun dusted the raw stump thoroughly, laid a thick pad of clean lint over the bone ends. Then he bound it firm with a dry roller bandage. Then he pressed two fingers to the man’s neck-artery pulse at the neck and looked up at two able-bodied farm hands standing by the walnut trees.
