PEDIGREED STALLION
Anne McCaffrey
“The deaths ye died I have watched beside And the lives ye led were mine.” Rudyard Kipling awoke, surprised that he had slept at all. Even more surprised that the persistent pain in his stomach had completely subsided. Not so much as a dull ache where a nagging agony had taken residence.
But there had been no new treatment suggested by his physicians to cure his ulcers. Indeed, he knew from the solemn way they had wagged their heads and delivered platitudes that his final reckoning was near.
Simultaneously then, his ever acute senses registered anomalies: the air around him was redolent of India, not England; he lay on a very hard surface—how could Carrie have replaced his bed much less strewn it with grit; and the temperature around him was far warmer than it had ever been in his chamber at Bateman’s.
. . .
