They Can Nearly Talk by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 1

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In the years immediately after the war, there was not much for an animal leech to do but to go out into the hinterlands and see if one might find a small portion of that purpose and, strange though it may sound to say it, harmony which had attended the army of the Valar.

As I bumped along the country roads north of Alqualondë on the backboard of the egg cart — all cushioning and clever springs were dedicated to the protection of the produce — I considered ruefully that there might have been only a smattering of positions available in Tirion, Alqualondë, or even Eressëa or Valmar, and those positions lacking what I loved most in leeching, but at least I would not have wasted days of my time in traveling to an admittedly scenic back end of beyond, only to be rejected.

What I loved most in leeching, then as now, was horses. In fact, all members of that family delighted me: swift and affectionate horses foremost; but also clever, charming donkeys; sensible and forthright mules; even the cantankerous but winsome wild ass I had operated upon in the grasslands of what is now, I hear, called Hollin. I did enjoy the ease of operations on dogs and cats, the satisfaction of straightening out a mixed-up lambing, and even the pride of getting a cow’s milk going once more – but none could compare to the care, however trivial, of a horse.

The promise of farm work dangled the potential of a great deal of horse-leeching tantalizingly before me. However, the driver of the egg cart, a verbose sometime-professor of speechcraft at the university in Alqualondë on sabbatical, had made it known to me that the proprietor of the practice I went to interview at loved one thing and one thing only: the fairest fowl, the wondrous chicken.

I had not previously had much to do with chickens, and the advertisement I had come upon in the Tirion student circular had not mentioned anything about them.

Sought, it had read, A junior partner for an agricultural practice in Merrilosto to the north of Alqualondë in the region of Ránanandë. Applicants must be comfortable treating illnesses and injuries of all sorts in all creatures great and small. Duties will include assisting Doctor Helwáriel in complex surgeries, conducting independent operations in the clinic and on outlying farms, and preparing and mixing medicines. Practitioners of Vanyarin, Noldorin, or Falmarin leecheries will be considered equally. Room and board provided. Wages competitive. Experience with marine life neither required nor sought.

Not a thing about chickens in it. I had been attracted by the broad-mindedness indicated by the explicit invitation to various schools of leeching, and including even potential Noldor, by a Telerin leech. My own training, which started in the Vanyarin pastures of my girlhood, continued on the remarkably mixed and educational battlefields of Beleriand, and was finished in the great university in Tirion, might well be an asset to such a person, rather than an affront. The opportunity to be abroad in the countryside about Alqualondë, which was proverbially beautiful, was attractive as well — as were, I had to admit, the room and board and the wages, which, while not competitive in Tirion, would go much farther in a small town.

Most of all, however, I had been desperate for any position not yet filled by others of the army — in the most literal sense — of returning soldiers looking for a new path in life. I had sent out many, many responses to similar advertisements since my graduation, and been rebuffed each and every time. Friends of mine had taken unsatisfying work, hoping that in a century or two, Aman would have readjusted to its fullness and the usual free-handed approach to one’s life’s labor would have returned.

To hear from this egg-deliverer that Doctor Elquessë was a devotee only of hens, roosters, and chicks, and would most likely be supremely disinterested in a horse-mad ex-shepherd and ex-soldier, was a blow.

As I pondered this possibility, quite insensible to the glorious, rolling hills around me, the egg cart rattled into a small town of tile-roofed, white-plastered adobe houses, arranged neatly around a central square with market stalls and little shops. The driver pulled to a stop before a slightly ramshackle three-story affair with a closed balcony of elaborately carved dark wood and a few red tiles missing from the graceful roof. On the wall hung a beautifully lettered plaque, hanging slightly crooked, that read “Elquessë Helwáriel, P.A.L.”

“Here you are,” said the professor of egg delivery. “The door is usually open; she keeps her waiting room in the front of the house.”

Thanking her, I dismounted the cart, rubbing a little at my thighs, my heart suddenly pounding. I had seen plenty of action in Beleriand, though the horse-doctors were largely kept behind the lines, but this whitewashed building, with its air of slightly disreputable aristocracy, sent a faint sweat prickling over my body. I took a deep breath and let my fëa course through my body, settling it, as I would a fractious horse. I waved to the driver, hoisted up my hopeful bag of instruments, and entered through the front door.

The waiting room was quite empty. It was a gracious sort of hall, with hexagonal terracotta tiles on the floor and handsome archways leading into what looked like a neat surgery, a dispensary room, and a passageway to the rest of the house. Prettily carved, though somewhat banged-about, wooden benches lined the walls, and a fine secretary’s desk practically exploded with bits of paper, knotted message-strings, and a gorgeous enameled pot stuffed to overflowing with twists of powder and pills. Out the window, a lovely formal courtyard garden in the Alqualondë style emanated a tranquility only increased by the fact that the orange trees were overgrowing their pots and the jasmine lining the arcades was making inroads on the upper stories. The entire impression, as from the outside, was of a beautiful and refined tree let go rather to seed. I rang the slightly dented bell on the untidy desk, which had a pure, silvery tone, and settled on one of the benches to wait.

It was not long before rushing footsteps in the passageway made me clutch my bag nervously.

Whatever I had expected of a lady animal-leech in an agricultural backwater, it was not quite what presented itself when the good Doctor Helwáriel — to whom I shall henceforth refer as “Elquessë,” for that is how we, dear friends all these years later, speak among ourselves — hurried into the room.

She did have the silver hair to which I had unconsciously ascribed her, though it was dressed in a manner I had never seen before, shockingly short and disordered at the front, and long and flowing as expected at the back. The fineness of her hair fought with the scandalous brevity of the cut, flopping over her eyes and in all directions from the crown of her head. Meanwhile, she walked bent forward with her hands clasped over her forearms behind her back, but her head up to scan out the path in front of her. When she saw me, she cocked her head to the side, fixing unusually dark eyes on me quizzically. The whole effect, I remember thinking to myself with a sort of dizzy hilarity brought on by nerves, was undeniably gallinaceous.

“I thought you would be Alparenë with the dropping samples for the fecal testing,” she rapped out, without a greeting.

“No,” I stammered, “I am Hyamessë Heriel. From Orvambo.”

Elquessë looked at me patiently, as though not understanding why I should expect her to react to my introduction.

“The applicant for your advertisement?” I added.

Elquessë clapped her hand together. “Of course!” she exclaimed. “You come in good time; I have not yet begun my rounds.” She looked me up and down with a quick motion of her head. “Are you dressed for work?”

Decades soldiering followed by years supporting myself as a university student in Tirion “from the tithe to the pot,” as they say there, had not left me with ample income for fancy clothes, though I prided myself on general neatness befitting a military leech. Anything I wore might as well be a work garment. I nodded.

“Very good!” cried Elquessë, in what I was to come to discover was her general attitude of great enthusiasm. “Come with me.”

So saying, she swept out the door to the courtyard garden. Clutching my instruments, I hurried after her as she picked her way expertly across the worn gravel paths, by a running fountain with only one rogue valley arrowhead blooming in the basin, and into the stables hidden behind the graceful arcades at the far end of the garden. The slight shabbiness of the rest of the building was not in evidence here: brass nameplates shone from the two spacious boxes currently in use, and the happy, dusty smell of straw and horse lifted my anxious spirits at once.

A velvety nose poked itself curiously out of a stall window, and Elquessë chirruped at it. It whuffled in a friendly manner in reply, and the rest of a handsome liver chestnut head emerged.

In a trice, Elquessë had the gelding — an absolutely princely Morikáno, if I were any judge, which I was — out, tacked, and hitched to an equally smart dogcart with wicker baskets beneath like those used by hunters for pheasants or dogs.

Once I was seated on the dogcart, slightly dazed, and Elquessë had snapped the reins and set us off at a flashy trot, she began to quiz me about my references, education, and so on.

I explained my background — that I was born in one of the little Vanyarin transhumances that ranged the slopes of Taniquetil, found a talent for mending the wounds of my goats and sheep with the Vanyarin facility for song-healing, then went to war in the train of Ingwion. I had promptly been stuck in the horse-lines with the Nandorin and Sindarin experts and found from them a love of horses and a great body of knowledge of Beleriandish horse-leeching, with their potions and formulae. Then I returned to Aman at war’s end: a toe lighter, as poor as ever, and possessed of a burning desire for a university degree from Tirion, where all the new surgical techniques for horses, sheep, cows, cats, birds, and all the feathered and four-footed friends were developing before my very eyes.

Elquessë listened closely, head cocked in that attitude which, now, if I were to see it from across a city square, would still identify her to me.

“That is all very good,” she declared, as the dogcart rattled across the country lanes, vineyards and pastures flashing by. “Practical experience: yes, though perhaps still a little green! Education: yes, and from many fonts! We are behind the times, out here, or the times have overtaken us. Now that Alqualondë is full again, fuller than it ever was with cousins from across the sea, there is great demand for what Ránanandë can give — wool, milk and cheese, grapes and wine, eggs.

“The eggs,” she went on, a fire in her eye, “are my main occupation. There is much to be learned from the common or barnyard chicken!”

She then launched into a disquisition upon the intricacies of egg formation, which would so advance the understanding of fetal development for all spined animals; of inheritance of traits, likewise; of the relationship between environment and development. All this, I was given to understand, was her true passion, and, being surrounded by large farms given over to the breeding and keeping of chickens to supply Alqualondë with eggs, she had found full scope for her enthusiasm, and wished to dedicate herself more fully to it. I held tightly to the sides of the cart and listened, eyes watering slightly against the breeze of our passage.

“That,” she concluded, “is why I need you. I have nothing against farm horses and dairy animals and the like, only they do impede my research. The practice really does need two leeches to serve the area; one could divvy the cases up evenly, but one could also simply give to one partner all things winged, and to the other, all else!”

The first hint of anxiety I had yet seen entered her face, just as a large, low-lying farmhouse came into view.

“I do know others like a bit of variety,” she said, then, reassuringly, “Your work would include a great many horses.”

I almost wanted to laugh, the anxiety of the day, the dogcart, the tests ahead jittering through me like bubbles in wine. I certainly would not mind a bit of variety, especially in this gloriously lovely country, especially with, it seemed, a supervisor who was more than happy to employ an assistant without one particular school of practice, or more experience than could be got in a war-trench. I hastened to assure her of this, trying not to sound over-eager.

Elquessë nodded firmly, then set about slowing the gorgeous Morikáno to a cooling walk, so we proceeded into the large open farmyard at a dignified pace. As she swung down to greet the farmer, she told me, “This is a monthly call to a family farm: chickens of course, goats, working cobs and dogs, and a mule. Let us see you at work.”

While she greeted a farmhand in rapid-fire Telerin dialect, I took a look around the farm, the first-met of that type with which I would later become so intimately familiar. The family’s house of white-painted adobe looked amiably upon a neat double-row of stables with the same red-tiled roofs. The stalls were refitted for a variety of animals — some covered over with wire for, I assumed, chickens, others with the connecting walls knocked in to house chipper nanny goats, and some left as they were for the currently absent cobs and mule. Off to the right, showing prettily in the late spring sunshine, flashing ribbons warned the birds from five or so acres of grapevines. All around were olive trees, small white blossoms just beginning to open. I had never been around so many at once, and could not place the aniseedy scent until I walked straight beneath one.

Elquessë finished her chat with the farmhand and beckoned energetically.

“Come along, Doctor Heriel; let’s put you through your paces!”

Swallowing, I followed Elquessë and the farmhand into the first stable block, where it seemed the animals needing attention had been set aside to await our arrival.

Our first patient was a handsome black-and-white billy goat. I saw no immediate signs of ill-health until he gamboled up to us and exposed his left side, where his horn had grown awry so that the point threatened to pierce his cheek.

The farmhand explained, “We spend half our time shaving the tip off, but the horn always grows back this way. One of these days, he’ll be out in summer pasture and it will grow straight through his cheek before we notice. Is there something more permanent you could do?”

Elquessë looked at me expectantly. I put my hands behind my back and cleared my throat. Dehorning an adult goat could be quite a difficult procedure, with a risk of hemorrhage and tissue death. There were ways, however, and I blessed my time in Tirion where these kinds of surgical innovations were at the cutting edge.

“I would suggest banding the horn,” I said, trying to sound confident. “It is much less violent than sawing it off, and there is less chance of dangerous complications. You could simply use the same bands you use to castrate the young bucks.”

“Won’t it hurt him, though?” asked the farmhand. “The other way, at least it would be quick.”

I glanced at Elquessë, but though she looked on with keen interest, her face gave nothing away.

“He will feel pain while the band is on,” I admitted. “If he were only a kid, I certainly would not recommend it. But with older goats, the horn is full of blood vessels, and the surgery to remove it is quite a major one — it would require sedation, which is dangerous on its own, and it would leave a much larger and more complicated wound. No, I would recommend the band, and remember that after a few weeks, it will be done with, and it will pose no more danger to him.”

The farmhand nodded, but looked to Elquessë for confirmation.

“I quite agree,” she said, bobbing her head. “I will leave a numbing salve with you to rub around the band, and that will help ease the discomfort. Send for me again once the horn has fallen off, and I will ensure the site stays clean and healthy.”

A shiver of relief passed through me as she spoke, then dug through her own bag to find the appropriate equipment and place the band.

The goat’s crooked horn seen to, the farmhand led us to the next box, where the comforting sight of a horse’s head greeted me. The sturdy bay cob, like the goat, did not immediately appear hurt or ill, until the farmhand picked up one of his lightly feathered feet and the distinctive odor of thrush reached me.

Elquessë gestured me forward, and I replaced the farmhand, holding the hoof between my knees. It was not a terrible case, all told — the black, infected parts of the hoof were not as extensive as I had seen in the terrible mud of Beleriand, and when I tapped gently on the hoof wall, I could feel no hot spots or tender patches. Nevertheless, untreated thrush was a promise of worse later.

I told the farmhand that it was a minor case that I could treat right then, if he would bring me warm water. I pulled the various necessities out of my own bag, blessing the forethought that had encouraged me to bring it along to the interview.

Replacing myself over the patient cob’s hoof, I picked out the remaining dirt from around the frog, then set aside the pick and scrubbed the whole base of the hoof thoroughly with the water and mild soap. The foot was generally well-kept, but I trimmed away a few ragged flaps of hoof until the healthy horn showed through and touched the clean air.

At this point, I looked over to Elquessë, who only looked more eccentric for my upside-down glance.

“What would you normally do to prevent recurrence?” I asked.

Elquessë replied, “I would give it a good whistle to keep the tissue healthy — it works wonderfully, but I do have to come back regularly to check on it.” Her eyes twinkled. “What are the hatchlings in Tirion doing these days?”

My heart gave a little skip. “They do still use the singing charms,” I said. “But only once, at the beginning. Then, you can pack fine clay mixed with a little of that new iodine over the affected areas, and reapply as needed. Then you don’t need to bring the leech out every week to make sure it stays gone.”

Smiling, Elquessë turned to the farmhand to ensure such a newfangled practice was acceptable. Hearing that it was, she took over the hoof, whistled her charm over all four, and gave me instructions to write down the recipe for the clay. The ingredients, she said, would be easily available in Alqualondë, even the iodine — for it was one of the great cities of the Eldar, no matter what the Noldor said.

I patted the patient cob’s neck — he had not leant on me even when it would have been more comfortable for him to do so! — and followed Elquessë to my next task.

It was clear even before we came in sight of the box that a more serious problem was at hand. The stall radiated the tension which I associated with the sick of any species, and the stablehand’s face was grimmer than it had been.

Inside, three large lambs, perhaps three months old, did not frisk or gambol, or stand to nudge at their mother’s udder. Their heads were up and their eyes were bright, but all of them lay in strange attitudes upon the straw. When the farmhand unlatched the door, the ewe stepped forward, bleating and hopeful for food, but the lambs stayed put.

Elquessë pressed her lips together.

“What has happened here?” she asked.

Before answering, the farmhand gently placed his hands under the nearest lamb’s belly and lifted it to its feet, then let go. Immediately, the lamb’s back curved, the hind legs trembled, and it went down again in a tumble of limbs.

“It started like that just a day or so ago,” he said. “I noticed that some of this year’s lambs were a little shaky, but not all of them were, and these ones were getting along all right until just the other day. We didn’t call you sooner because we knew you were coming today.”

Elquessë shot me a look, the twinkle in her eye much diminished. There are few creatures as charming as a lamb, and to see them in such a state was sobering. She pressed her lips together.

“What do you think, Heriel?”

My heart in my throat, I knelt beside the lamb the farmhand had raised up. Though I knew it was unlikely, given that all three lambs seemed to be in the same state, I ran my hands through the light, soft fleeces, checking for injury. I lifted each little cloven hoof in turn and found them unblemished. I whistled up a small light and watched the animals’ pupils contract evenly.

I stayed crouched beside the lamb, my mind working frantically, very aware of Elquessë standing behind me.

In the corner was a pile of lamb droppings, and I searched through it for signs of worms or ticks, and found nothing. It was not parasitic paralysis, then. It could not be spinal abscesses, not in all three little animals. That left swayback to explain the floppy curve of the spine and the immobile legs.

There stood the mother, hind limbs firm and back straight.

“Have her other lambs had this problem?” I asked.

The farmhand shook his head. “This is only her second lambing, but the first were fine young sheep; easy sellers in the market. We’re at a loss; we don’t have much to do with sheep in the normal way. We mostly keep the ewes for a bit of extra spinning, and to help the goats eat down the grass and weeds in the vineyards.”

It was not inherited swayback, then. What could its cause be? My nerves, and Elquessë behind me, kept my heart jumping in my throat. Even so, something itched at the back of my mind. Those vineyards we had passed coming in – they had followed the rolling hills so elegantly, long snaking lines of greenery over the reddish dirt of the well-drained hills.

My eyes widened.

“Is the soil up there all sandy?” I demanded. Elquessë made a humming noise in the back of her throat. The farmhand nodded.

“It’s good for the grapes.”

I braced my hands on my knees and stood up. “It’s copper deficiency,” I said decisively. Then I stole a glance at Elquessë. “Or I suppose it could be cobalt deficiency; I would have to test their blood to be sure… but it is much more likely to be copper. You said you had them eating the grass between the vine rows?”

The farmhand nodded again. I went on.

“Sandy soils with much iron often lack copper. If the ewe only ate that grass, these three could have started sickening before they were even born. Swayback often hides for a while, even months, before progressing to this state.”

Elquessë gave me an approving look. “That seems likely,” she said. “Did she graze on those slopes with the previous litter?”

“No,” said the farmhand slowly. “We bought her already pregnant.”

“Well,” Elquessë said. “I think we can assume that this is a good working theory, though I should like to take some blood from these three to confirm. You should not feel afraid to let her graze on those hills in future – only add a little copper to her food, or rotate her through different pastures more often while she is lambing.”

A high-pitched bleat sounded by my knee. The prostrate lamb butted its head against my knee. All the pride I felt at solving the puzzle cooled and drained out of me, leaving only a sick sense of dread.

Just that moment, the farmhand asked the awful question: “How will you treat this lot, then?”

I looked back at Elquessë, who met my desperate glance sternly. This was to be part of the test, I realized.

Swallowing, I said to the farmhand, “There is no treatment for a progressive case of this severity.” His eyes went wide, but I kept speaking, as though I were delivering a report to General Ingwion himself. “Already they cannot follow their mother to suckle, and the paralysis will worsen until they cannot move at all, even to swallow, and they will starve or suffocate. The kindest thing to do is to give them a good death now.”

Opening his mouth to protest, the farmhand turned to Elquessë, but she was nodding decisively, a practiced expression of solemn resolve on her face.

“I will take a blood sample from each of them,” she said. “This will confirm Doctor Heriel’s surmise, and I will send you the results by pigeon.”

She looked sorrowfully down at the lambs. “However, regardless of the cause, this is swayback, and it is clearly progressive, from your description. Doctor Heriel is right to recommend putting an end to their suffering.”

The farmhand put up no resistance after that. Elquessë led the mother sheep out of the pen, singing softly to calm her and dry her milk. I did the same with the lambs, singing them down into deep sleep, where no pain or distress could reach them.

Too much killing weakened a healer, and some of the more traditionalist Noldor said the effect was particularly strong for women, but I had never noticed any lessening of my abilities after administering mercy killings, clean and painless, to animals too ill or wounded to go on living. If anyone had asked, I might have said that some death was part of life, and no one asked Oromë if his hunts diminished his might — that perhaps murder and the muddy hell of war were harmful in a way that helping a few small lambs, who would die regardless, out of the world in a warm box stall was not.

Even so, it was a joyless procedure, and I regretted the three little white bodies on the straw.

Elquessë returned without the ewe and laid a hand on my shoulder. She did the necessary business with the farmhand, and helped him bear away the lambs to the butchery to ensure their lives were not wasted.

In the dogcart returning to Merrilosto proper, Elquessë chirruped to the gelding, then wrapped the reins around her wrist, sighing.

“I’m damned sorry about that, Heriel,” she said, with sympathy warming her rough voice. “I did not expect that visit to include such a case. You handled it well, if it is any consolation.”

I looked over at her earnest, aristocratic face. The war had been a never-ending parade of death, it seemed, and I was well used to far harsher loss of life than this. Any animal leech who put their own distress ahead of the needs of an animal in pain would not last long. Nevertheless, I had not expected the visit to include such a lethal puzzle either, and my enjoyment in the glorious countryside was dimmed. Thrush, a horn banding, and then killing three lambs: it had hardly been a great show of my qualities.

I thanked her, but could find little else to say.

Elquessë hummed, and we drove on in silence until the first outlying buildings of the town came into view. Then she spoke again.

“In a way, I am glad I was able to see you handle it. You were gentle, matter-of-fact. You did it swiftly and kindly. Many would not have kept their heads so level, and it would have been worse for everyone involved. It is no battlefield here in Ránanandë, but farm work is hard work, as I am sure you know, and ‘also in Valinor I am,’ and all that.”

She took the gelding down to a walk, and went on. “On that basis, and on the basis of your other leechwork there, I would very much like to take you on. What do you say?”

Suddenly, the spring day regained some of its vitality. I had not ruined my prospects after all! I had, after all, cured where I could, and ended pain where I could not. And how beautiful, I thought, were the rolling vineyards and glossy oaks, and how kind Elquessë had been to reassure me.

“I would be thrilled!” I said. “Really? I mean, yes, certainly.”

Elquessë made a fist and thumped me jocularly on the thigh, expertly maneuvering the dogcart into the courtyard with one hand. The Mórikano, clearly used to this sort of thing, did not so much as flick an ear.

“Very good, Heriel! I don’t suppose you could start tomorrow?”