The Burning Road

by Ann Benson

  They started with those in most desperate need of care, and as each new victim came in Alejandro took a quick look to assess the wounds and ordered the man to be laid out in the appropriate row. Amputations, without laudanum, were done in mere seconds, and the wounds tied off with the piece of garment no longer needed after the removal of the limb. The severed limbs themselves were brought to the pile of bodies, lest their draining blood make the road into a river of red mud. Alejandro told Kate to go into the longhouse and bring out faggots enough to make a fire, and then to light it with a coal from the hearth, and when it was burning lustily they dug out red coals and used them to cauterize the bleeding limbs.

  Alejandro took the sword of a fallen man and thrust it into the fire, withdrawing it only when it was glowing red. He attended to a hundred gut wounds by pressing the sword against the gaping holes, and thus stopped the bleeding and thwarted the putrefaction that would otherwise surely follow. After each use, he would thrust the sword into the fire again, to purify it. Often, the wounded wanted nothing more than for someone to pray for them. They sought only to die in company, not alone in the mud, trampled by horses’ hooves and sneered at by the soldiers of Navarre. So Kate would kneel at the man’s side and softly whisper, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” and it was laudanum for the souls as they departed to what peace lay on the other side.

  The hours passed like minutes, and the wounded numbered more than a thousand, when Alejandro heard the insistent pounding of hooves from the forest on the west side of the road. He stood up from dressing a wound to see who was coming, for it was surely more than one rider. The riders were too far yet to see, but the fresh sound of the animals meant that they could not be friendly. The horses of les Jacques would all be exhausted by now, many surely fallen. He looked around for Kate, who he saw across the road, praying for yet another dying man.

  “Kate!” he cried out.

  She looked up from her patient.

  “Take shelter in the longhouse! These riders are not ours. Go, now!”

  “But, Père …”

  “Now!”

  She picked up her bloody skirt and dashed through the trees to the longhouse.

  Just moments after she disappeared from view the Baron de Coucy and Charles of Navarre himself rode out of the forest. They led their horses through the rows of wounded, taking little care not to step on those already down, and headed straight for Alejandro.

  “Are you the medicus?”

  He stared straight ahead in silence.

  “Are you the medicus? Karle told us of a wife.” Getting no answer, Navarre glanced toward the longhouse and back again, and saw Alejandro’s face tighten. “He said her father was a physician. Answer me, man, or I shall ride through these wounded with a vengeance.”

  Very quietly, Alejandro said, “I am.”

  Charles of Navarre jumped down off his horse. With the baron close by, his hand on his sword, the king of Navarre strode purposefully toward Alejandro. He pulled up his sleeve to expose a deep gash on his arm. “You will treat this wound, then. It is my sword arm, and I cannot be disfigured.”

  The wound was not so deep that Navarre stood to lose the arm, but Alejandro knew that it was causing the man considerable pain. He took the arm in his hands and examined it more closely. “The best treatment for this is cautery and stitching.” He pointed toward the waning fire, which wanted more fuel. “You are welcome to plunge your arm into the fire to prevent putrefaction. Now, if you will leave me, there are dying men to be attended to.”

  He felt the tip of Coucy’s sword under his chin. “His Majesty has requested that you treat his wound. These peasant swine will wait. And die, for all one cares. But the king will be treated.”

  “I must have your promise first. That you will not harm my daughter. Or me. I am sorely needed by these unfortunates.”

  Navarre sighed, almost casually. Alejandro knew it was costing him considerable self-control not to cry out. “I gave my promise already to Karle that I would not harm his wife. I don’t suppose it will harm me to make the same promise for her father. Very well, you have my word on both counts.” He extended the arm, and grimaced slightly. “Now, this wound, if you please.”

  “I have no laudanum.”

  “Laudanum be damned. I do not wish to have my wits dulled at my hour of greatest triumph. Just sew me up and I shall be on my way to celebrate my victory.”

  He looked around; there were no rebels who stood to die without immediate help. “Follow me,” he said, and he led them through the woods.

  When Kate saw the royal emblem on his mantle, her face became a twist of rage and anger, and she started to rush forward, until she saw the sword at Alejandro’s back.

  “We will treat the king’s wound, and then he shall leave us,” Alejandro said.

  With visible difficulty, she stood back.

  “You will bring thread and a needle. Plunge the needle into the fire.”

  He washed the wound with clean water and picked out the dirt introduced by the sword that had made the cut. He sutured it carefully and neatly, while Navarre dripped sweat onto his own mantle as he fought against the excruciating pain. Alejandro dressed the wound with herbs and tied a linen bandage around it. All this he did with the point of Coucy’s sword pressed up against his liver.

  And when it was done, he said, “After three days, remove the bandage and pour wine over the wound, white wine if you have it, then wrap a fresh bandage around it. After a fortnight, you may cut out the thread. Be careful to remove all of it, or what remains inside the wound may fester and we will have done all this for naught. Rest this arm for a turn of the moon, so the freshly made skin will not tear. Your only disfigurement will be the marks of the sutures. And the scar, of course. But your arm will once again be a sword arm if you do what I tell you to do.”

  Navarre rolled down his sleeve and said, “Well done, Physician. You are fit to serve a king, I think.” He turned to Kate. “Now, if the lady will come with us …”

  “But what of your promise?” Alejandro hissed.

  “I promised not to harm her,” Navarre said with a smile. “But I did not promise not to take her. She is comely, and will suit me well, I think. I like a woman with fire, especially in my bed.”

  Kate rushed toward him shrieking, “Murderer, betrayer!”

  Coucy caught her by the arm and twisted her around, and pressed his knife under her chin.

  “Let her go,” Alejandro begged, “take me instead, I can be of great use to you.”

  The distraction of his pleas gave Kate enough time to reach down into her stocking and pull out her own knife, and before Coucy knew it she spread her legs and cut right through her own skirt with the fine sharp instrument, the tip of which came to rest barely a finger’s breadth from his manhood.

  “You may kill me,” she said, “but as you do, I will take all your future children with me. You must believe me when I tell you that I care not if I live or die right now.”

  Coucy believed her. He pulled his knife away from her chin and held it away, and she rushed away from him, into Alejandro’s open arms.

  As he went through the door, Coucy said, “A shame that Karle had to die. He never had the chance to savor your spirit. A pity.”

  “Murderer,” she hissed after him, and then she collapsed.

  32

  The mint wrapper might as well have been a boulder, so immense was its presence in her pocket.

  “Come with me,” Kristina said. She took Janie’s hand and pulled on it, as a child might. “I want to show you the lab.”

  Janie glanced quickly at Tom. He nodded and said, “I have some things to take care of. Go ahead.”

  At some cost, Janie was managing to keep her discomfort hidden, but as Kristina started to talk about what they would be seeing she found herself more willing. “There’s a lab here?” she asked with genuine surprise.

  “There’s everything here. You won’t believe this place. But you’re go
ing to love it.”

  Soon Janie found herself being led through the gathered people in the main room to an exterior door, and when they stepped outside the controlled climate into the night, the air felt foul and heavy in contrast to the light cleanliness of what she’d breathed within. It was just the sort of thick, wet air that minute floating things loved.

  She stopped, midstep, and stood still.

  It passes through the very air, and so invades the corpus.…

  Alejandro’s words.

  For a moment, she experienced a panic akin to being underwater, as if she were about to fill her lungs with something they were not intended to hold and could not survive. She took in as small a breath as she could and plunged forward after Kristina, her hasty steps crunching over the gravel path with uneven clumsiness. She did not release the half-breath until they were safely inside another building. As the door closed behind her again, shutting out the foulness, she expelled the air aloud to rid herself of the imagined contamination.

  Kristina continued to be oblivious of it all—there was too much else to think about, and she gave herself over to it with youthful vibrance. She led the way down a softly lit passageway, chattering as she progressed about all the wonderful things they had yet to see. Janie struggled along behind her, feeling light-headed and balancing with one hand against the wall as she walked. Finally Kristina stopped in front of one particular door, and with obvious pride, she said, “Here it is.”

  The lights inside the room went on automatically when she opened the door, shedding a bright luminance that looked like filtered sunlight and caressed Janie back to a state of balance. She stored it against the darkness to come and stepped into the modern laboratory beyond the door.

  She was flabbergasted by what she saw. She stood in the open doorway of the large white room as her eyes roamed from item to item, admiring the rich assortment of instruments and machines and computers contained therein. It was a playground worthy of even the most demanding researcher.

  “This is … remarkable,” she said with great reverence.

  “I know. It’s a wonderful place to work. This is where I extracted the DNA sequence.”

  On one counter there rested a cardboard box with its flaps opened out. Dribs of shredded excelsior revealed that it had yet to be unpacked, so Janie walked over and glanced inside. It was filled with unopened smaller boxes. Janie knew, by the corporate names printed on their sealed flaps, that each one would contain some wonder of technological manufacturing, perhaps an instrument or a gauge. Janie picked up one of the cartons and read the specifics of the contents, which turned out to be, not surprisingly, the best of that particular item that money could buy. She replaced it carefully with its companions and said, “You aren’t even completely set up yet. I can’t imagine what this lab will be like when you do get everything in place and working.”

  “It’ll be unbelievable. I can’t wait.”

  Janie shook her head slowly back and forth, an expression of her disbelief. “Remarkable,” she said. “Wonderful. And I can see now why you managed to get that work done so quickly.”

  “Speaking of which,” Kristina said, “there it is. I mean, he is. What’s left, anyway.” She nodded in the direction of a small ice chest on one of the workstations.

  Janie went to the chest and opened it. Inside was a stoppered beaker with perhaps an inch of pale yellow-gold liquid in it. Janie picked up the beaker and regarded it for a moment, then set it back down in the ice chest. “You know,” she said, “this is just the most amazing thing you’ve done here.”

  “We’ve done,” Kristina corrected her. “If you hadn’t come up with the original material, I couldn’t have multiplied it.”

  After a long pause, Janie said, “I suppose you’re right. It was a cooperative effort.”

  “The first of many, I hope.”

  Janie did not respond to Kristina’s kind words in the way she imagined Kristina would want her to. She stayed almost expressionless when she said, “I have no doubt that you and I will have a lot of interaction to look forward to.” Then she glanced downward, in slight sadness. “But I’m feeling very frustrated because I know these boys aren’t going to get the rest of what they need. Not until everything calms down again. Some of them may not make it through the—the disruption, despite what we were able to do for them.”

  They both knew it was true; it was a very sobering thought. “There’s not going to be much we can do about that. We’ve done what we had to do, what we could. At least now they’ll have a chance. And that’s what really matters, to me, anyway. The rest will be up to—whoever is out there to do it. But as soon as the serum takes, and the proper genetic string is absorbed, the danger of additional broken bones will really be reduced. And their surgeries will have a chance of being successful. And then, when the next wave is over, there’ll be a place to start from.”

  “There may not be any ‘whoevers’ left out there. The ‘whoevers’ got hit pretty hard last time.”

  Kristina looked at her sadly. “I know. But that’s out of our hands. Completely.”

  She left the lab feeling as if she’d had the stuffing knocked out of her, a feeling she knew she was going to have to get used to. She rejoined Tom in the cavernous main meeting room, and by the time he’d finished showing her around the complex it was nearly midnight.

  “I’m almost speechless,” she whispered as she walked by his side. “But there’s something you need to consider … if people find out about this place, you’re going to be inundated.”

  “That’s why we’ve been so quiet about it. To the outside world it looks like just another summer camp.”

  “People will try to crash it. You know that.”

  “They’ll have to get past an electronic fence. Linda Horn’s husband was more than an energy engineer—he was a weapons expert when he served in the military. So now we have a slew of tranquilizer rifles, ready to go. One decent shot will drop an intruder in about six seconds.”

  “But even if you manage to keep it quiet, there’ll be other people you want and need, and the population will grow—where are you going to put everyone?”

  “We have six hundred acres here.”

  “Six hundred! Jesus, Tom, how did you get all this land?”

  “The camp came with a good chunk of it, but I managed to round up the rest through what you might call quiet acquisition.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that there are a few town clerks with very nice retirement accounts in the surrounding area. Every time someone got sick or died, or a piece of property went into probate, I’d get a call.”

  “And the money for all this came from …?”

  “I’ve settled a couple of pretty impressive lawsuits.” He smiled and added, “Quietly.”

  “But six hundred acres—that’s a small town!”

  “Sometimes it feels like it.”

  “Should I be calling you Mr. Mayor?”

  “No,” he laughed. “Not me. I’m hoping the place never gets so big that we need a government. The meetings are already tricky enough.”

  “Well,” she said, “you’ve only got yourself to blame for that, with Sandhaus here.”

  He let a moment pass, then said, “Actually, the most problematic one is Kristina. When we’re making decisions as a group, she’s always very vocal. I think it’s her youthful notion that she can change the world—we all had it at one time or another. She’s having hers in troubling times, though, so she gets pretty enthusiastic. Sometimes it takes a long time to explain things to her so she really understands.”

  Janie stopped walking and took firm hold of his arm. “I know you know her—beyond all this, I mean.”

  He looked her directly in the eye. “What makes you think that?”

  Out came the mint wrapper. She held it in her open palm, and his eyes went straight to it.

  “This,” she said. “I found it under the bed in the guest room. It’s like a fingerprint for her. She leaves
them all over the place.”

  In the pause that followed, Janie saw Tom’s expression soften and then sadden. He seemed to drift for a moment before he spoke. “You’re right,” he said, “I do.”

  And then he was quiet, leaving Janie to push for an explanation. “Care to elaborate?”

  “I’d like to think about what I’m going to say before I get started with it. Right now I’ll just tell you that I told her mother I would take care of her.”

  “Her mother—so Kristina’s not, uh … your, uh …”

  He gave her a hard look. “My, uh—what?”

  “Girlfriend, I guess.”

  “Janie! How could you even think such a thing?”

  “Well, you hid your relationship from me entirely—why would you do that unless there was something about it you didn’t want me to know?”

  “Okay, so I did hide it. But that doesn’t mean it’s what you seem to think it is.”

  After that stern declaration, Janie stayed quiet for a moment.

  “Her mother is dead?” she finally said.

  Tom sighed. “Yes.”

  “You knew her mother—well?”

  “I did. Very well.” He took Janie’s hand in his own and started walking toward the main building. “It’s getting late.”

  She decided not to press him further, and followed along. “I know. Very late. I don’t know how I’m still awake. I must be running on adrenaline.”

  “If you’re hungry I could make you something.”

  “No, thanks, you don’t need to go to any trouble for me. And I think I’m too wired to eat, anyway. I need to wind down.”

  He slowed his pace, then came to a stop again on the path. Somehow in his presence the heavy outside air seemed less menacing. “Want some help?” he asked.