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Returning to your seclusion, you next arrange for the resettling of your misaligned shoulder – the Trachian servants accommodate your requests for a craftsman, lumber and iron nails, chariot wheels, heavy stone bricks, and rope, in addition to a large mid-day feast. All these arrive in the hall outside your guest room, which you’d previously partitioned with tapestries into a secluded space for rehabilitation. Around mouthfuls of your meal, you direct the carpenter, an unflappable Trachian of fifty summers, in the construction of a simple rope and pulley device. A broad platform, a square of about a stride’s distance in each dimension, is nailed together from rough planks of pine, and then laid upon the floor. Ropes are looped under the sturdy pine platform, and brought high into a complex sailor’s knot, and then the line is threaded over the “pulley” – really, just a heavy length of rope that has been nailed into the chariot wheel on two wooden legs. Finally, the end of the rope itself has a polished wooden handle affixed to it, for your mighty right hand to grasp.
Bracing yourself, you lift the platform aloft with your right hand, and signal to the carpenter to begin loading the bricks. Over the next several minutes, you make subtle adjustments to your grip and positioning of your shoulder, until you find the building pressure coming to rest within the deeply buried joint. Finally, when the pressure becomes unbearable, you grit your teeth and buck against the tension with a measured twist of your torso – your vision whites out as your shoulder cracks loudly... and finds its proper placement. Pain races up your neck and down your flanks, but to your relief, fades quickly – the little key that joins your shoulder to your neck is perhaps only cracked, and not shattered. Rest comes to you easily that night, and in the morning, the bruising and swelling of your shoulder is further reduced.
>Hippomedon has 5/13 wounds!
In the morning, you steal out of the Trachian palace very early – your quarters are simply too cramped to be comfortable. You use the excuse of a hunting trip to place yourself in isolation in the hills to the south for the majority of the day. The fresh air and light exercise brighten your attitude and freshen your mind; you catch a small boar in the morning, and not long after, a foolish young buck – these you skin and roast for your lunch. Thankfully, you had requested salt, oil and seasonings from Eurykratides’ kitchens before you set out – all confident hunters might have done the same. In the afternoon, you range about the wooded peaks with no particular goal in mind, the Malian Gulf shining brightly below you, but come across nothing of interest.
Upon your return, Euryratides invites you to the pre-event feast, but you politely decline, in order to conceal the state of your health, and deny the Theban a chance to assess you – <span class="mu-i">let him stew in uncertainty</span>, you think.
