by Stacey Berg
“And that,” Lia said, “is why you’re not the med. Send the next one in, please.”
The next one was, in fact, bleeding, though not very hard; Lia stitched the wound with a fine thread of polymer soaked in fermentate and left Hunter to bandage it after. The next two the med sent away with more powders from her jars, then one more with stitching. Lia was right, there were too many. Last winter’s grain shortage showed itself in the weak and sick who came through the door, privation leaving their bodies without the resources to repair damage that would not otherwise have been so serious.
A gravid woman entered, swollen almost as big as the nuns. She clutched her man’s hands throughout the examination, the two of them following Lia’s every movement in something that looked to Hunter like terror. The med, eyes closed in concentration, shaped her hands this way and that around the woman’s full belly, then reached up inside. At last, she opened her eyes and smiled. “You’re doing wonderfully now that the sickness is past, Tralene. Just a few more weeks.”
The woman’s eyes brimmed. “Do you think . . . do you think this one will be all right?”
Lia washed her hands in the basin Hunter held. “This baby’s the right size, and he’s right way up.”
“He!” the man exclaimed. “Is it a boy? I’ll have a son?”
Lia laughed. “I’m sorry, Drayton, I shouldn’t have said. We won’t know until the baby’s here. You just take care of Tralene, make sure she eats the extra portions the Warder sends, and I think whichever it is, it’ll be nice and healthy.”
The woman said, “Thank him for us, Lia. And you, thank you, I don’t know what I would have done, after the first one, I—I—” She burst into a flood of messy tears.
“Thank you, Lia mam,” the man said earnestly. “And tell the Warder—anything, any way we can repay his kindness . . .”
“He doesn’t need anything, Drayton, you know that, but I’ll tell him that you said.”
“The Warder does all this and asks for nothing?” Hunter asked as she helped put a clean cloth over the examining table. “Strange kind of trade. He’d never make it in my place.”
“Maybe you haven’t found the right place,” Lia answered. She smiled, but her golden eyes were serious.
There’s no way she can know. The catch in Hunter’s breath brought Lia’s eyes to her face. Before the med could question her she said with a shrug, “I know the teachings. Saint preserves the Church, and Church preserves the city. That’s good enough for me.”
“Really? I’m not so sure the Church can teach us everything. Sometimes I think even the Saint doesn’t know all of it, or all about us—what’s inside us. Don’t you ever feel like we have to find that for ourselves?”
Blasphemy, the deepest-rooted part of Hunter wanted to charge, but the med wasn’t a hunter, and the word didn’t fit the open, unguarded gaze Lia offered her, a look that made Hunter feel as unworthy as she did in the sanctuary. The Saint had looked at her like that once too, in the desert before Hunter had dragged her back to face the altar.
She swallowed the painful swelling in her throat. “People in this clave say some strange things,” she said, struggling to keep her tone light, conversational. “Must be what the Warder teaches you.”
The med looked at her. “It’s what I believe,” she answered simply.
Suddenly Hunter did not want to probe any more. Fatigue bore down on her, the sleepless night and the long walk and the strain of all the posing. She told herself she should stop before she made a mistake that cost her the position she had worked to gain. There would be time to press on later. Weak, said the voice in the back of her head. “Maybe you’re right,” she conceded.
The med held Hunter’s eyes a moment longer. “Well, one thing the Warder does say is that what you do matters more than what you think. Let’s see if between the two of us we can find a way to help a few more of those people out there.”
They made their way through the line of visits. Hunter observed how the med approached the problems, what questions she asked, the way she poked and prodded and studied. Hunter had seen the priests work like this in the infirmary, the med would fit in well with them—
The room grew suddenly distant. The med’s lips were moving but it was the priests’ soft interrogation she heard, the shadowless infirmary light that made her blink in surprise, twitching her nose at the sharp smell of chemicals and disinfectant, all for a moment more vivid, more real in her mind than where her body stood, this foreign room where she had no place—
“Are you all right?” the med asked sharply as Hunter grabbed at a chair to stop the dizziness.
“I’m fine,” she muttered, clasping the metal hard enough to hurt. “I just—”
All at once there was a commotion at the door, shouts and someone bursting through. Without thinking Hunter leapt in front of the med, shoving her down behind the marginal safety of the chair. She reached automatically for her static wand before she remembered it was hidden with her other gear in the desert camp. Instead her hand closed over a tall medicine bottle; a quick flick of her wrist and she held a jagged glass dagger, cold and comforting. Guards who had been half dozing in the corners so long Hunter had almost forgotten them sprang alert, too late to prevent the entrance of two men, faces taut with panic, supporting a third man between them who was screaming every breath and spraying blood everywhere. “Help me! Oh, Saint, help me, please!”
“Get him down!” Hunter dropped the shard of bottle and pushed all three of them towards a bed. They wrestled him across; he was white with blood loss but thrashing so in his panic that they could barely hold him. “Keep him still. I said, still!” She couldn’t even see where he was bleeding from, only that he was soaked with it and every time he moved another stream spurted from wherever it was. “Stop it,” she told him urgently. “I’m trying to help you, hold still.” But he was too far gone to listen. She reached for his throat. The sleep hold might kill him, weak as he was, but he would die for certain if he kept thrashing. The guards stared uselessly, weapons dangling.
But the med was already kneeling at the top of the bed. “Look at me,” she said, taking the man’s blood-spattered face between her hands. “Just look at me. You’ll be all right. Look.” Somehow her calm demand cut through the chaos. His eyes, barely focused, searched hers out, and all at once he went limp, unresisting. Hunter thought for a breath he was dead, but the blood was still pumping.
From the mangled remains of a hand, she saw now. He must have caught it under something heavy and moving. Gobbets of flesh hung stripped from bone; glistening pinkish fragments spiked out in no relation to where fingers should have been. Someone made a retching noise. Hunter swallowed a wave of her own nausea and ripped the remains of his sleeve up to the shoulder. She wrapped the rag quickly around his upper arm, pulling it tight as she could. She scanned the room, searching. “Give me your knife.” The guard stared at her stupidly. “Give it to me. And the sheath. Hurry.” Fumbling, he handed it over, staring as if he expected her to cut the man’s throat. Instead she tied the sheathed blade quickly in the rag, then twisted, using it as a lever until it pulled the cloth tight enough to staunch the spraying blood to a slow ooze.
Hunter drew a breath, but before she could speak the med said, “Get his clothes off. What happened to him?” She inspected the rest of his body quickly while the man who answered averted his eyes.
“He’s a grower down at the stads. Crop powder exploded in his spreader. Must’ve been a spark.”
“Did anything else happen, or just the hand?”
“Just the hand.”
Hunter didn’t see any other injuries either. The hand might be enough. The man’s breathing was heavy, irregular, his face slack. Hunter looked at the med. “The hand has to come off if he’s going to have a chance.”
“I know.” The med stood, wiping her bloody palms calmly on her s
kirt. “I have what we need.”
By the time they were done, the man’s friends had retreated to the outer room and one of the guards had fainted in a heap in the corner. The man had come awake once, screaming hoarsely for mercy; Hunter had no choice but to apply the sleep hold then. But he kept breathing, and now the clean cloth wrapped tightly around the stump of his wrist had only a little stain on it, and they had gotten dry sheets under him and tied him loosely to the bed, in case he woke again.
Hunter wiped a gory hand on her pants. “He should live, unless he lost too much blood.”
“Yes.” The med had a streak of red across her chin, another splotch on her forehead. Her face had never lost its calm. She was thoughtful now, evaluating Hunter as she had the patient. “You’ve done this before.”
“There are accidents everywhere. Sometimes I was in a position to help. So I learned.”
The med did not press her. “There’s a water tap through there. You can wash; I’ll clean up in here. Teller”—this to the guard who had propped his fainting comrade against the wall and was slapping his face none too gently to revive him from his stupor—“please find some clean clothes for—come to think of it, I never heard your name?”
Hunter took a deep breath. “Echo.”
“Echo.” The med smiled, and it turned her eyes to honey. “It’s good to know you. Teller, please bring some clean clothes for Echo.”
The med looked like a child with her wet hair tied back in a string and a too-big shirt with rolled-up sleeves hanging loosely over her long skirt. They were her own clothes, from a small chest in the back room; she had lost weight recently, or never cared to adjust them properly. The clothes the man Teller had found Hunter fit her better; worn and patched as they were, they would be perfectly serviceable. She looked, she knew, like a guard, or a hunter; she would find no trace of a child if she searched her own image in a glass.
The baby she’d brought to the Ward, which had miraculously slept through the screaming and all the other noise, woke with a start and began wailing at the top of its evidently healthy lungs when Lia shut the door with a gentle click. Laughing, the med scooped it up. “I think there’s enough milk still in that bag. Pass it here, will you? Loro should be back any time now with the girl.” And indeed it wasn’t long before the baby had been sent off with a wide-eyed young woman, still walking gingerly, and the med’s promise that the Warder would make sure the nursing mother got enough to eat to keep the milk coming. Before they left, Loro had demanded a summary of the morning’s activities. His face clouded forebodingly over Justan’s explanation of Hunter’s role, but Lia forestalled him with a pat on the arm. “I think the Warder would want to know,” she said, and though his nod was curt, he chose not to argue, and his hand was gentle enough as he took the limping girl’s arm to help her out the door. Hunter watched them go, the girl already smiling and cooing at the baby as if it were her own. Just like the young nuns with their first-born in the Church, the priest-made babies that would be the new hunters, already fiercely demanding to be fed, to be cleaned—
Her chest tightened, crushing inward on her heart. She tried to take a deep breath—it will pass, it will pass—Saint, it was worse here than in the desert—and with another dislocating jolt, it was the children she saw, waiting forlornly for her in the camp where she had abandoned them, the fierce girl squatting on her heels banging rocks together with a scowl while the boy plucked at his rags and worried— Stop it, she told herself savagely. Don’t let them see. Nothing but breath, one in, one out, past the constriction, in, out, until finally the constriction began to give way. She wiped sweat surreptitiously from her face, hoping that Lia wouldn’t notice, hoping that if she did she would blame a belated reaction to all the blood. . . .
She jerked fully back to the present, still primed for action, at a knock on the door. But it was only a visitor, a stranger with a little pack for the med. It held bread, and a bit of cheese. “There’s enough for two,” Lia said, offering her a generous half. Hunter shook her head, though her stomach rumbled loud enough for the med to hear. “When was the last time you ate?”
In the camp, this morning, no, yesterday . . . “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to take your share.”
“Don’t worry, the Warder will send more.” She pressed the bread into Hunter’s rough, sunburned hand. “I told you: we take care of each other here.”
Hunter slipped into the daily routine without resistance. It was easy enough: she simply didn’t ask again about leaving, and if the Warder had any further plans for her, or even remembered that she was there, no one brought it up. If she didn’t think of the Church, the Saint; if she didn’t think of Tana, or the children in the desert, what they would be doing, whether they had found food—no, don’t think about it—this duty was no more difficult than any other, and more comfortable than most. She had shelter in the form of her own pallet in a corner of the main room, and there was enough food, brought to the med by some or other emissary from the Warder. There was always a guard or two, but they appeared to be there as much to manage the crowded anteroom as to watch over Hunter. Loro, clearly their leader, came every day, sometimes more than once, bringing Lia news or supplies, or occasionally sharing a meal; those times he could almost seem pleasant, at least with the med. Towards Hunter he maintained a cold hostility by which she understood that he viewed her as a threat, though she didn’t think he knew exactly why. He manifested it mainly by ignoring her as thoroughly as possible, which only made it easier for her to fade into the background and observe.
Once, after he walked out the door in just such a way that Hunter had to step inconveniently aside or take a shoulder as he passed, Lia laid a light hand on her arm. The incessant physical contact among the cityens was hard for Hunter to adjust to. Hunters never touched but for a purpose, but the cityens did it all the time, casually, just as they laughed and chatted. The med’s touch was soft and gentle, like everything about her; Hunter didn’t object. “He doesn’t mean anything by it,” Lia said. “He’s just protective of me. We’ve known each other since we were small; he thinks of me as a sister.”
Probably not a sister, Hunter thought, a tiny spark of wry annoyance catching her by surprise, but she didn’t argue.
The days might have dragged, but she had useful work to pass the time, assisting the med when she saw the ill or injured people who made their way to the clinic. Milse, whom Hunter had taken for Lia’s assistant, seemed happy enough to pass off those duties, pronouncing that Hunter could do them better anyway. There was another advantage as well: the people talked. Not quite as much as the nuns, but enough for her to begin to put together a picture that she could take back to the Patri. It would be much like all the other times she had reported to him: he would listen intently, fitting her observations into the larger picture he had, his expression of concentration so like the priests as they looked through their magnifiers—then the shock of remembering that she could not expect to sit with him again, would never— No, don’t think about that. Focus, here, now.
It was like any other wound, she reasoned wearily. The pain and fear were normal, to be used when possible, tolerated when not. There was no sense dwelling on them. Shaking herself, she listened closely, rarely speaking, only occasionally asking just the right question, casually, not to draw suspicion, the way a stranger might wonder, mildly curious, how they did things here.
Much of the talk circled back, one way or another, to the Warder. It seemed that everyone had a personal tie, a time that he had extended extra grain chits before they had been earned, sent food when someone was too sick to work, dragged a boy back from the lawless gangs of the neighboring Riverbend and set him to honest work trading labor for chits down in the stads. Hunter hadn’t realized how critical the flow of chits had become, at least in the Ward. From what she gathered, many people didn’t even hand them in directly for grain rations anymore,
as the Church intended; they simply passed them among themselves as tokens, trading for one thing or another until the chits had somehow obtained a value of their own. The Warder must have gathered a considerable store to himself, to be able to pass them out in exchange for nothing more tangible than the cityens’ goodwill. It was, she thought uneasily, another thing the Patri needed to know, when—if—she reported back to him.
Meanwhile, she told herself that she was still doing a hunter’s duty protecting the cityens, if not in any way she had before. She maintained the guise of the suspect trader, skilled more from practice than from training, but it didn’t take long for Lia to see that Hunter could attend to the less seriously injured herself, freeing the med to see the worse hurt and the ill. For them there often seemed to be no answer; yet most of them left somehow comforted, like the old man Hunter had seen the first day.
Lia smiled at all of them, but in the evenings, sometimes, Hunter saw the smile fade, and the med’s golden eyes grew sad and weary. “I don’t know where I’d be without your help,” Lia said one night as they shared yet another meal of bread and cheese. “Milse tries, but he doesn’t really like blood and mess. He’s much happier flitting around the clave trading for supplies and gathering gossip for the Warder. And anyway, it isn’t usually this bad. The sickness last year . . . Most of these people never really recovered.” She shook her head. “We need a good harvest. If we go into next winter without enough for them to eat—well, I don’t have to tell you.”
“No.” Hunter studied the med’s shadowed face. “You should take on apprentices. There’s too much work for one.”
“Apprentices?” The med laughed ruefully. “I’m not much more than one myself.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is, you know. Jonesen was the real med here, he’d worked with the Warder for I don’t know how long. Before I was born, probably. We lost him near the end of the sickness. Most of the rest of the city meds too.” Hunter wondered briefly if the Church had known about that, or cared. Lia went on, “He took me on when I was just a girl. He used to watch me with the other orphans in the Warder’s shelter. He said he saw something in me, I can’t imagine what.” Her mouth curved at the memory, eyes misting. “I had the sickness myself, and Jonesen never left my side, even after he started getting ill. I would have died without him, but by the time I was well enough to do anything, it was too late for him.” She smiled again, with an effort. “Who was it who taught you?”