Takes on Spots: Four, by Sophonisba [backstory challenge]
-title- Takes on Spots (4/5)
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-rating- Suitable for general audiences.
-spoilers- I still haven't managed to see "Sateda" yet, so I don't know if any of this would be contradicted by something in that.
-characters- Ronon
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine.
-word count- 2962
-summary- In which the meaning of "inoculation" before it became used as a synonym for "vaccination" is demonstrated.
Takes on Spots: Four
Ronon grew up in one of the market towns, not Ring City. It was a pleasant place to grow up, built on an easily defensible site -- defensible against other humans, not Wraith; Satedans were more familiar with the anarchy that too often followed in the wake of a culling than they would have liked, and generations later had yet to pull down their walls even when they had expanded beyond them. His house had a garden with a purpleflower tree and an unrepentant brake of sweet and juicy briarberries, and in the summers he and his mother and siblings would go out and pick them and make jams and cobblers and shortcakes.
The inoculators had come through when he was five and a half, but his mother had thought that he was really too little to suffer even a mild case and put her foot down when his father wanted to send him.
Then they didn't come through again for well over three long Satedan years; Ronon had lived through his thirteenth anns and his parents had made plans to send him to the city in order to get him properly inoculated before his ninth birthday by the time the inoculators returned. His parents willingly gave up those plans once they had the opportunity of having it taken care of in town: Ronon wasn't quite sure whether to be happy or sorry for it. On the one hand, he didn't quite like the idea of being sick in a strange place, and on the other -- he hadn't seen Ring City since the class trip right after his eighth birthday, and this time he would have gone alone, unlike the previous trip or his inoculation now, when his parents were sending the eldest of his younger sisters and brothers as well.
Still, what was done was done, and he packed his bag according to the list that his father had drawn up, feeling pleasantly superior to his sister and brother, who needed his father to pack for them. He ran down to the newsstand and bought three new pulps to sneak into his bag and take with him: a collection of stories of gunslingers and mounted cowherds from the Old North, the latest edition of Stunning Tales (featuring art of a handsome man in the tatters of army fatigues, brandishing both a pulse-gun and a long knife as he stood over the corpse of a woman with soldier's locks, and whose blurb promised the story of a taskmaster promoted to be taskmaster-general to the first legion to be assigned a male officer), and the first full-length adventure of the Shadow Snake, in which she would outwit and bring to justice jewel thieves, Wraith worshippers, and a ring of blackmailers.
On the day of the inoculation, they took the trolley down from the high town to the market, and hired one of the wagon-porters to pull Ronon and Colwyn and Orula's bags after them to the inoculation hospice, which was some walk out of the town's nominative borders and downstream from the market.
The hospice was a large stone building with many windows and bars on the lower halves of most of them. By the door, neatly displayed behind glass, were the certificates of qualification in inoculation of a doctor, an intern, and two nurses. There were several other children there with their fathers, and a man and woman wearing the armbands of visiting nurses were trying to organize them into something resembling a line.
Ronon was the oldest of them, however. He was starting to wonder whether he was the oldest uninoculated person in the world when the outworld traders strolled round the bend in the path, irritation in their almond-shaped eyes and round faces.
"Didn't expect to see you here," Colwyn's friend Zaron's father commented.
Karajen, the leader of the traders, snorted. "Apparently, you won't let us return through the Ring until we've gone through this... ceremony, so we might as well get it over with now before we go back to the city and the Ring."
Ronon's father leveled a look at him. "Well, if we let you go back and you'd taken the full strength of the little pocks, you'd get home and fall sick and then most likely die in agony, taking your friends and family with you. We tend to frown on that kind of thing."
Karajen rolled his eyes, but subsided.
The youngest of the three traders huffed. "I've had the little pocks."
"Do you have proof of it?" the female nurse asked. "A record, or something?"
"Who writes such stuff down and carries it with them?"
"We do," Ronon hissed to Colwyn and Zaron. (Orula was hiding behind their father. Again.)
The third trader laughed. "So much for your pride that you came through it unscarred, Toraman!"
"I have a scar," Toraman admitted grudgingly, "on my left buttock."
"There's no way we can tell whether that's from the little pocks or a bad case of skin-eruption," the nurse said dryly. "Indulge our paranoia."
"What, we don't get to try?" the intern who'd come with the doctor called disappointedly.
The doctor hissed at her in a low voice.
"Orula," their father told them, "I never want to see you behaving like that."
Orula nodded, moisture in her eyes, and clutched her toy hart tighter, its leather antlers pressing into her skin.
After everyone had been given a number, the male nurse let them into the house itself and gave them painkiller pills with iced tea to take them with, and one by one they were called into the room that had been set up as an inoculation chamber. Some of the smaller children had their fathers come in with them -- Orula was one. Colwyn didn't, although he yelled like a stuck pig, enough to be heard through the heavy wooden door.
When Ronon's number was called, he marched in stoically, determined not to make a baby of himself. The doctor and her intern smiled at him, and he sat in the indicated chair, deciding to pay close attention to everything that went on so as not to make an idiot of himself when the part that hurt came around.
"If you would hold out your arm, please, Yeoman Dex," the doctor said with only a glance at her notes. Ronon complied, pleased to be addressed as an unmarried youth rather than a child. Obviously, despite the cool of the stone house, his father had been right when he'd advised Ronon to wear a vest rather than a tunic.
The female nurse scrubbed a patch of his upper arm with carbolic, and the male one handed the intern a scalpel from under a cloth.
"Would you like -- " the intern offered.
Ronon shook his head.
She took hold of his arm above the elbow with her left hand and neatly sliced into the arm between its two big muscles with her right.
Ronon might, possibly, have made a noise that someone else might have mistaken for a whimper, but he did not cry out; not then, and not when the intern dropped her scalpel into a low pan of clear liquid and then used her free hand to hold the cut open.
The doctor smiled at him, removed a corked glass tube from the rack to her left, worked the cork out, accepted a pair of tweezers from the male nurse, and very carefully picked the infected thread out of the tube.
Ronon held his breath as she carefully, carefully laid it within his cut, and he rather thought everyone else did too.
Once that was done, the medical personnel burst into a flurry of motion; the doctor dropped her tweezers into the pan of liquid, which the female nurse bore away; the intern pinched his wound shut and blotted up the blood with a flax pad, which she then dropped into a waste bag held open by the male nurse; and the nurses came back with flaxen thread and a curved needle, respectively.
The doctor washed her hands in carbolic and sewed Ronon's wound closed with two stitches. The intern began to bandage it.
"No iodine?" Ronon asked, puzzled. Whenever he had cut or scraped himself deeply, his parents had painted the wounds with iodine.
"We don't want to kill off the little pocks before it can infect you," the doctor explained. She had a kindly smile, and Ronon wondered whether she had grandchildren.
When the bandage was neatly on, the nurses dismissed him, and Ronon's father helped him and Colwyn and Orula unpack in the rooms that would be theirs until the little pocks had run its course. Orula was upset that she had to stay in the girls' room, but Madam Rell's eleven-annu-old daughter offered to look after her. Arima Rell's hair was bright red-gold and her round face was as lightly freckled as the traditional Satedan standard of beauty might wish, and Ronon had never been more conscious of his outRing chin than at that moment.
Then all the parents except five-year-old Naymie's father went home and left their children to their newfound quarantine.
The first day was irritating -- fortunately, a thunderstorm blew up in the afternoon, making nearly everyone reconciled to spending it inside. Arima Rell organized a game of herb basket, and Ronon, silently disdaining such a childish pastime, joined in (after all, he only had three pulps and one Improving Book, given him by a well-meaning uncle.)
Over the next dozenight, the confinement went from merely irritating to outright infuriating. The medical personnel, assisted by Naymie's father and three live-in servants hired in the town for the inoculation period, had the thankless task of trying to keep twenty-three children and three outworlders fed, clothed, in clean linens, and in order, and one or the other tended to break down on any given day. Two of the children's inoculation sites got double-infected and had to be drained of pus. Even reading at the slowest rate possible, Ronon finished his Northern and got well into Stunning Tales.
Then he woke up aching all over. He tried to finish the story about the taskmaster-general (as well as a man officer, the legion had two enlisted women and other elements of topsy-turviness), but the letters on the page made him queasy, and after sitting very quietly for some time he wound up helplessly retching into the water-closet.
"Well, it's to be expected," said the male nurse, and helped him back into bed.
Toraman proved to be the only one not running a temperature, and was pressed into service, walking up and down the long room bringing ice and replacing slop pans; apparently he had been telling the truth about having had the little pocks. Naymie's father might have been helping out too, but he would be in Naymie's room if so and therefore made no impression on the boys.
Even before the fevers and aching stopped, he started getting pimples. Hundreds of pimples, thousands of pimples, millions of pimples. And they were all over. They were on his face. They were on his arms. They were on his scalp. They were on his palms. Ronon was sure that one of these days, he would discover one under his tongue. And they hurt, and they itched -- not simple itching, but a sort of itching on the underside of his skin -- and they weren't even normal pimples, but nasty little hard things that hurt to press. It was as if someone had whisked him out of his skin, shaken millet into him, and pulled it back on while he slept, which he had been doing a lot.
Eventually, far too slowly, the nasty swellings dried up and crusted into pocks. Only some of Ronon's had, though, by the time he decided to save the Shadow Snake for last and start in on his uncle's Improving Book.
The book proved to be as Improving as one could reasonably expect. Its hero, Kelland, was a poor but honest city boy whose father died in the opening pages, leaving Kelland to act as the second parent to his rambunctious brothers and sisters and get a succession of jobs to help his mother out. At least the adventures of the children were relatively entertaining. Then Kelland favorably impressed an old doctor from one of the valley towns, who hired him to become a companion to her wild grandson.
Naturally, the grandson, Tamman, proved to be, although friendly enough to Kelland, game for any rig and with a positive genius for succumbing to the blandishments of wastrel women, spending their substance and his as well in riotous living. The riotous living and dens of iniquity that Tamman dragged Kelland through were summarized briefly, rather than described in the fascinating detail a pulp would have used. Instead, space was given to Kelland's romantic entanglements as he grew older: two young gentlewomen, bitter rivals, vied for his favor and his hand, while the humble apple seller quietly adored him from not-that-afar -- Ronon guessed he was supposed to sympathize with the last, but she was insanely boring. He hoped Kelland would get together with the rivals, who would then slowly overcome their hatred in a greater cause and choose to cleave together in the end.
Meanwhile, Tamman took to drink, and to shaba-nut, and to gambling, and then to the most terrible habit of all, a habit that sapped his strength, and hollowed his eyes, and thinned the hair of his head, and thickened the hair of his seat, and caused him to lisp, and see double, and that so horrified the Improving Book that it refused to say what in the worlds the habit was.
Ronon puzzled over it for a few hours before waving over the next attendant, who happened to be the doctor, in order to ask her.
The doctor took one look at the page he indicated and flushed, her lips thinning.
"That book is wrong," she told him after she visibly brought herself under control. "Back in the day they used to believe that that would happen, but now we know that it is natural and necessary for men not living with wives."
"Yes," Ronon said thoughtfully, "but what is?"
Staring out over his left shoulder, she told him.
Ronon's mother and father had raised him to mind his manners, and he really did try not to burst out laughing. He didn't quite succeed, but he did try.
After he had laughed himself out, he asked the doctor whether she would mind please writing a letter to his uncle, letting him know that it was in fact natural and necessary to jerk off. Ancestors willing, perhaps this would be the way to improve his uncle's disposition.
The book turned out not to be a total loss (even though Kelland did marry the apple seller and her aunt after Tamman poisoned himself with sleeping-draught); now that people were starting to wobble around and talk to each other, Karajen offered to "buy" the book -- he could use a laugh -- in return for an offworld pulp on shiny paper that was. according to Karajen, a dashing tale of slavery and sea pirates, complete with several thrillingly bloodcurdling illustrations. It was all in Ringspeech, so it would take Ronon plenty of time to read it, and he would probably be home by the time he really, really wanted a dictionary.
His pocks dried out and one by one flaked off, leaving smooth or slightly dry skin behind in almost all cases. Except for two of the ones on his chin -- ones that he had poked, although not as often as some others -- that left little dents behind when they came off.
"I scarred," Ronon said, looking in the mirror.
"You did," Colwyn agreed.
"It's not that bad," the male nurse told him. "No one will be able to tell it's not from skin eruptions."
Which didn't help.
"Oh, that's lucky," said Karajen when he saw them. "A good beard will cover those right up." He stroked his own (wispy, draggly, and looking fit for the rag-bag) beard thoughtfully.
Ronon wasn't sure whether he wanted to grow a beard, but he thanked the trader politely and buried himself back in the derring-do of the Shadow Snake, who thought nothing of swinging from building to building on a grappling-rope and always carried at least one gun and her twin knives, Ari and Quelle. It even proved enough to help distract him from the ruckus when Zaron and Colwyn organized a game of indoor tag.
And then the last of the pocks fell off the last of the inoculees and they packed up, setting their bags out and receiving numbers again -- this time, the traders went first, as they were only getting their certificates of inoculation. Ronon wound up nearly at the end of the line.
When it was Ronon's turn, the intern handed him his certificate first thing, and then he took off his shirt so that one of the nurses could wash him with carbolic before the doctor carefully selected her needles and touched up his blood type -- it had faded and distorted a little as he'd grown -- before neatly adding the tiny sigil of a successful little pocks inoculation.
He put his shirt back on and went out the front door, where his father was waiting with Colwyn and Orula and all their bags and a wagon-porter. The three of them proudly showed off their new tattooes to their father and the porter and each other, and then they set off for the walk home.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-rating- Suitable for general audiences.
-spoilers- I still haven't managed to see "Sateda" yet, so I don't know if any of this would be contradicted by something in that.
-characters- Ronon
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine.
-word count- 2962
-summary- In which the meaning of "inoculation" before it became used as a synonym for "vaccination" is demonstrated.
Takes on Spots: Four
Ronon grew up in one of the market towns, not Ring City. It was a pleasant place to grow up, built on an easily defensible site -- defensible against other humans, not Wraith; Satedans were more familiar with the anarchy that too often followed in the wake of a culling than they would have liked, and generations later had yet to pull down their walls even when they had expanded beyond them. His house had a garden with a purpleflower tree and an unrepentant brake of sweet and juicy briarberries, and in the summers he and his mother and siblings would go out and pick them and make jams and cobblers and shortcakes.
The inoculators had come through when he was five and a half, but his mother had thought that he was really too little to suffer even a mild case and put her foot down when his father wanted to send him.
Then they didn't come through again for well over three long Satedan years; Ronon had lived through his thirteenth anns and his parents had made plans to send him to the city in order to get him properly inoculated before his ninth birthday by the time the inoculators returned. His parents willingly gave up those plans once they had the opportunity of having it taken care of in town: Ronon wasn't quite sure whether to be happy or sorry for it. On the one hand, he didn't quite like the idea of being sick in a strange place, and on the other -- he hadn't seen Ring City since the class trip right after his eighth birthday, and this time he would have gone alone, unlike the previous trip or his inoculation now, when his parents were sending the eldest of his younger sisters and brothers as well.
Still, what was done was done, and he packed his bag according to the list that his father had drawn up, feeling pleasantly superior to his sister and brother, who needed his father to pack for them. He ran down to the newsstand and bought three new pulps to sneak into his bag and take with him: a collection of stories of gunslingers and mounted cowherds from the Old North, the latest edition of Stunning Tales (featuring art of a handsome man in the tatters of army fatigues, brandishing both a pulse-gun and a long knife as he stood over the corpse of a woman with soldier's locks, and whose blurb promised the story of a taskmaster promoted to be taskmaster-general to the first legion to be assigned a male officer), and the first full-length adventure of the Shadow Snake, in which she would outwit and bring to justice jewel thieves, Wraith worshippers, and a ring of blackmailers.
On the day of the inoculation, they took the trolley down from the high town to the market, and hired one of the wagon-porters to pull Ronon and Colwyn and Orula's bags after them to the inoculation hospice, which was some walk out of the town's nominative borders and downstream from the market.
The hospice was a large stone building with many windows and bars on the lower halves of most of them. By the door, neatly displayed behind glass, were the certificates of qualification in inoculation of a doctor, an intern, and two nurses. There were several other children there with their fathers, and a man and woman wearing the armbands of visiting nurses were trying to organize them into something resembling a line.
Ronon was the oldest of them, however. He was starting to wonder whether he was the oldest uninoculated person in the world when the outworld traders strolled round the bend in the path, irritation in their almond-shaped eyes and round faces.
"Didn't expect to see you here," Colwyn's friend Zaron's father commented.
Karajen, the leader of the traders, snorted. "Apparently, you won't let us return through the Ring until we've gone through this... ceremony, so we might as well get it over with now before we go back to the city and the Ring."
Ronon's father leveled a look at him. "Well, if we let you go back and you'd taken the full strength of the little pocks, you'd get home and fall sick and then most likely die in agony, taking your friends and family with you. We tend to frown on that kind of thing."
Karajen rolled his eyes, but subsided.
The youngest of the three traders huffed. "I've had the little pocks."
"Do you have proof of it?" the female nurse asked. "A record, or something?"
"Who writes such stuff down and carries it with them?"
"We do," Ronon hissed to Colwyn and Zaron. (Orula was hiding behind their father. Again.)
The third trader laughed. "So much for your pride that you came through it unscarred, Toraman!"
"I have a scar," Toraman admitted grudgingly, "on my left buttock."
"There's no way we can tell whether that's from the little pocks or a bad case of skin-eruption," the nurse said dryly. "Indulge our paranoia."
"What, we don't get to try?" the intern who'd come with the doctor called disappointedly.
The doctor hissed at her in a low voice.
"Orula," their father told them, "I never want to see you behaving like that."
Orula nodded, moisture in her eyes, and clutched her toy hart tighter, its leather antlers pressing into her skin.
After everyone had been given a number, the male nurse let them into the house itself and gave them painkiller pills with iced tea to take them with, and one by one they were called into the room that had been set up as an inoculation chamber. Some of the smaller children had their fathers come in with them -- Orula was one. Colwyn didn't, although he yelled like a stuck pig, enough to be heard through the heavy wooden door.
When Ronon's number was called, he marched in stoically, determined not to make a baby of himself. The doctor and her intern smiled at him, and he sat in the indicated chair, deciding to pay close attention to everything that went on so as not to make an idiot of himself when the part that hurt came around.
"If you would hold out your arm, please, Yeoman Dex," the doctor said with only a glance at her notes. Ronon complied, pleased to be addressed as an unmarried youth rather than a child. Obviously, despite the cool of the stone house, his father had been right when he'd advised Ronon to wear a vest rather than a tunic.
The female nurse scrubbed a patch of his upper arm with carbolic, and the male one handed the intern a scalpel from under a cloth.
"Would you like -- " the intern offered.
Ronon shook his head.
She took hold of his arm above the elbow with her left hand and neatly sliced into the arm between its two big muscles with her right.
Ronon might, possibly, have made a noise that someone else might have mistaken for a whimper, but he did not cry out; not then, and not when the intern dropped her scalpel into a low pan of clear liquid and then used her free hand to hold the cut open.
The doctor smiled at him, removed a corked glass tube from the rack to her left, worked the cork out, accepted a pair of tweezers from the male nurse, and very carefully picked the infected thread out of the tube.
Ronon held his breath as she carefully, carefully laid it within his cut, and he rather thought everyone else did too.
Once that was done, the medical personnel burst into a flurry of motion; the doctor dropped her tweezers into the pan of liquid, which the female nurse bore away; the intern pinched his wound shut and blotted up the blood with a flax pad, which she then dropped into a waste bag held open by the male nurse; and the nurses came back with flaxen thread and a curved needle, respectively.
The doctor washed her hands in carbolic and sewed Ronon's wound closed with two stitches. The intern began to bandage it.
"No iodine?" Ronon asked, puzzled. Whenever he had cut or scraped himself deeply, his parents had painted the wounds with iodine.
"We don't want to kill off the little pocks before it can infect you," the doctor explained. She had a kindly smile, and Ronon wondered whether she had grandchildren.
When the bandage was neatly on, the nurses dismissed him, and Ronon's father helped him and Colwyn and Orula unpack in the rooms that would be theirs until the little pocks had run its course. Orula was upset that she had to stay in the girls' room, but Madam Rell's eleven-annu-old daughter offered to look after her. Arima Rell's hair was bright red-gold and her round face was as lightly freckled as the traditional Satedan standard of beauty might wish, and Ronon had never been more conscious of his outRing chin than at that moment.
Then all the parents except five-year-old Naymie's father went home and left their children to their newfound quarantine.
The first day was irritating -- fortunately, a thunderstorm blew up in the afternoon, making nearly everyone reconciled to spending it inside. Arima Rell organized a game of herb basket, and Ronon, silently disdaining such a childish pastime, joined in (after all, he only had three pulps and one Improving Book, given him by a well-meaning uncle.)
Over the next dozenight, the confinement went from merely irritating to outright infuriating. The medical personnel, assisted by Naymie's father and three live-in servants hired in the town for the inoculation period, had the thankless task of trying to keep twenty-three children and three outworlders fed, clothed, in clean linens, and in order, and one or the other tended to break down on any given day. Two of the children's inoculation sites got double-infected and had to be drained of pus. Even reading at the slowest rate possible, Ronon finished his Northern and got well into Stunning Tales.
Then he woke up aching all over. He tried to finish the story about the taskmaster-general (as well as a man officer, the legion had two enlisted women and other elements of topsy-turviness), but the letters on the page made him queasy, and after sitting very quietly for some time he wound up helplessly retching into the water-closet.
"Well, it's to be expected," said the male nurse, and helped him back into bed.
Toraman proved to be the only one not running a temperature, and was pressed into service, walking up and down the long room bringing ice and replacing slop pans; apparently he had been telling the truth about having had the little pocks. Naymie's father might have been helping out too, but he would be in Naymie's room if so and therefore made no impression on the boys.
Even before the fevers and aching stopped, he started getting pimples. Hundreds of pimples, thousands of pimples, millions of pimples. And they were all over. They were on his face. They were on his arms. They were on his scalp. They were on his palms. Ronon was sure that one of these days, he would discover one under his tongue. And they hurt, and they itched -- not simple itching, but a sort of itching on the underside of his skin -- and they weren't even normal pimples, but nasty little hard things that hurt to press. It was as if someone had whisked him out of his skin, shaken millet into him, and pulled it back on while he slept, which he had been doing a lot.
Eventually, far too slowly, the nasty swellings dried up and crusted into pocks. Only some of Ronon's had, though, by the time he decided to save the Shadow Snake for last and start in on his uncle's Improving Book.
The book proved to be as Improving as one could reasonably expect. Its hero, Kelland, was a poor but honest city boy whose father died in the opening pages, leaving Kelland to act as the second parent to his rambunctious brothers and sisters and get a succession of jobs to help his mother out. At least the adventures of the children were relatively entertaining. Then Kelland favorably impressed an old doctor from one of the valley towns, who hired him to become a companion to her wild grandson.
Naturally, the grandson, Tamman, proved to be, although friendly enough to Kelland, game for any rig and with a positive genius for succumbing to the blandishments of wastrel women, spending their substance and his as well in riotous living. The riotous living and dens of iniquity that Tamman dragged Kelland through were summarized briefly, rather than described in the fascinating detail a pulp would have used. Instead, space was given to Kelland's romantic entanglements as he grew older: two young gentlewomen, bitter rivals, vied for his favor and his hand, while the humble apple seller quietly adored him from not-that-afar -- Ronon guessed he was supposed to sympathize with the last, but she was insanely boring. He hoped Kelland would get together with the rivals, who would then slowly overcome their hatred in a greater cause and choose to cleave together in the end.
Meanwhile, Tamman took to drink, and to shaba-nut, and to gambling, and then to the most terrible habit of all, a habit that sapped his strength, and hollowed his eyes, and thinned the hair of his head, and thickened the hair of his seat, and caused him to lisp, and see double, and that so horrified the Improving Book that it refused to say what in the worlds the habit was.
Ronon puzzled over it for a few hours before waving over the next attendant, who happened to be the doctor, in order to ask her.
The doctor took one look at the page he indicated and flushed, her lips thinning.
"That book is wrong," she told him after she visibly brought herself under control. "Back in the day they used to believe that that would happen, but now we know that it is natural and necessary for men not living with wives."
"Yes," Ronon said thoughtfully, "but what is?"
Staring out over his left shoulder, she told him.
Ronon's mother and father had raised him to mind his manners, and he really did try not to burst out laughing. He didn't quite succeed, but he did try.
After he had laughed himself out, he asked the doctor whether she would mind please writing a letter to his uncle, letting him know that it was in fact natural and necessary to jerk off. Ancestors willing, perhaps this would be the way to improve his uncle's disposition.
The book turned out not to be a total loss (even though Kelland did marry the apple seller and her aunt after Tamman poisoned himself with sleeping-draught); now that people were starting to wobble around and talk to each other, Karajen offered to "buy" the book -- he could use a laugh -- in return for an offworld pulp on shiny paper that was. according to Karajen, a dashing tale of slavery and sea pirates, complete with several thrillingly bloodcurdling illustrations. It was all in Ringspeech, so it would take Ronon plenty of time to read it, and he would probably be home by the time he really, really wanted a dictionary.
His pocks dried out and one by one flaked off, leaving smooth or slightly dry skin behind in almost all cases. Except for two of the ones on his chin -- ones that he had poked, although not as often as some others -- that left little dents behind when they came off.
"I scarred," Ronon said, looking in the mirror.
"You did," Colwyn agreed.
"It's not that bad," the male nurse told him. "No one will be able to tell it's not from skin eruptions."
Which didn't help.
"Oh, that's lucky," said Karajen when he saw them. "A good beard will cover those right up." He stroked his own (wispy, draggly, and looking fit for the rag-bag) beard thoughtfully.
Ronon wasn't sure whether he wanted to grow a beard, but he thanked the trader politely and buried himself back in the derring-do of the Shadow Snake, who thought nothing of swinging from building to building on a grappling-rope and always carried at least one gun and her twin knives, Ari and Quelle. It even proved enough to help distract him from the ruckus when Zaron and Colwyn organized a game of indoor tag.
And then the last of the pocks fell off the last of the inoculees and they packed up, setting their bags out and receiving numbers again -- this time, the traders went first, as they were only getting their certificates of inoculation. Ronon wound up nearly at the end of the line.
When it was Ronon's turn, the intern handed him his certificate first thing, and then he took off his shirt so that one of the nurses could wash him with carbolic before the doctor carefully selected her needles and touched up his blood type -- it had faded and distorted a little as he'd grown -- before neatly adding the tiny sigil of a successful little pocks inoculation.
He put his shirt back on and went out the front door, where his father was waiting with Colwyn and Orula and all their bags and a wagon-porter. The three of them proudly showed off their new tattooes to their father and the porter and each other, and then they set off for the walk home.