by Patty Jansen
That each part of the population does the tasks assigned in the bylaws.
How many seats are in the council?
One hundred and thirty-one.
Who sits in the council?
One seat from each family, and a seat can be allocated to others if the family relinquishes it.
Mikandra knew all the answers, but Liseyo faltered through and grew more timid with every question.
How is the High Council elected?
Liseyo shrugged and looked down at her plate.
Father sighed and rolled his eyes. "We just had the election and your aunt won a place in the High Council. We went through the entire process. Where is your sense of observation?"
Liseyo said nothing. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
"It's happening right in front of you. We discussed it then. Try to remember."
There was a heavy silence.
Eventually, Liseyo blurted out, "I don't know. I forgot."
"Then I shall take steps so that you won't forget."
Mikandra itched to shout out Can't you see that she's upset? But there was no time for an argument. She had to go to the hospital or be late.
She collected her cloak from the hall and left the stifling atmosphere in the house for the crisp morning air.
Snowflakes still descended from the sky, adding to the slippery slurry in the streets. The clouds hung low over the city and occasionally blanketed the roofs of the Endri family houses, each in its own walled yard. Some houses, like the neighbours', were painted white, but those made from natural stone had turned dark grey with the humidity. Patches of lichen bloomed in weather like this, with orange ooze leaking from the little plantlets. By mid-morning, the groundsmen would be out scrubbing the stuff off the walls.
They were about to go into low-winter, that season when life in Miran seemed to come to a halt as everyone hid indoors from the cold and blizzards. It was the season of long dinners where grandmothers would tell old tales about how every year the suns got jittery and debated jumping out of the sky.
It was a good story that frightened young children, but of course these days, people knew that Ceren's orbit was elliptical and the sun-cycle—the twenty-day rotation of both suns around each other—only seemed to speed up during that time because the planet's comparative speed was less when it was further away. There was no annual judgement and no curses by irate ancestors, but those things all made for good frightening tales.
True to the stories which said that at low-winter the ancestors sent clouds to eat the city, buildings vanished in and out of the mist while Mikandra walked down the hill. One moment, the watchtower was gone, next only the top would be visible and the next only the bottom. She'd been up there once on a clear day, and seen the entire city underneath her, and the mountain valley that was the city's home, a patchwork of bean crops and oil seed fields. She'd seen the mountain slopes that rose to the southern end of the city, with meadows that were fragile green with tiny flowers and burbling brooks when the snow melted, plains of waving dead grass when the suns passed overhead and the wind was merciless and dry, and fields of snow in both high and low winter. The day she climbed up had been one of the rare occasions that the view to the east was clear, and she had seen all the way down the mountain pass into the blue haziness of the eastern plain.
The view from the Mirani watchtower was famous in all the settled worlds, so incredible that people claimed you could see the curve of the horizon, although Aunt Amandra said it was nonsense, because you couldn’t see the curve until you were much higher.
Mikandra remembered that when she was young, she would occasionally see some foreigners climbing the many steps that wound around the outside wall and remembered her grandmother complaining about tourists as if they were some scandalous thing.
The watchtower had been built in the old days, when the city was young, and people feared attacks from outside. Yet the only time that it might have helped its citizens, it had failed. Like the city walls, like so much in Miran, it was a relic of the past. The city guard made a show of putting on men on tower duty, but it was a symbolic role. The air and land around the city was these days monitored by the Exchange. Technology had moved on.
Mikandra entered the hospital grounds, and climbed the steps into the building.
With the first snow came the first cases of frostbite and an increase of the number of people visiting the hospital. Scores of patients waited in the cavernous foyer, which echoed with the voices and shufflings of the sick. Coughing and moans. Sorry heaps of people sat on the hard chairs huddled in filthy matted cloaks. Mikandra knew a lot of the faces. She'd seen them with frozen fingers or weeping sores or skin infections, hacking coughs and other ailments caused by the cold. They were Nikala, all of them.
A few harassed-looking nurses walked around, taking records of each patient and their ailments. One greeted Mikandra with a weary smile. Calintho, youngest daughter of a branch of the Takumar family. She couldn't help thinking another girl shunted into a thankless job. Bet Calintho was infertile, too.
But she clamped down on those thoughts. She was going to be positive today. Cheerful and dutiful. The perfect self-sacrificing healer. But the letter in her pocket still reminded itself of its presence by poking a sharp corner through the fabric of her dress.
Mikandra hung her cloak in cloak room and paused in the doorway to the emergency ward where patients were taken for first treatment. Her mentor Eydrina Lasko stood by the bed of an elderly man who had been brought in yesterday with a hacking cough and for whom the regular ward had obviously not yet provided a place. Eydrina was a middle-aged woman— married to an upper city administrator, but with no children. She wore her bushy curly hair—an indicator that she was of the Nikala class—in a loose plait over her back and had tied the springy curls that escaped the tail with a headband.
She hadn't seen Mikandra come in, and continued to examine the patient with competent hands.
The bed next to him had held a new mother with a fever yesterday, but today there was a young man with his leg propped up on pillows. He looked asleep. The bed on the other side held an elderly woman—a homeless grandmother who came here often, usually with feeble excuses that barely justified keeping her in the hospital. She usually cried when she was told she had to make way for patients in greater need.
Then there were people with bandaged heads from attacks of the flying maramarang that scavenged on rubbish after dark, someone with a broken leg, others with sores. Most patients were old. Most were men. Most were homeless.
Looking at her tutor, surrounded by a sea of misery, Mikandra felt a dread creeping up in her. If this was only the start of low-winter, things would only get worse when the real cold hit.
Eydrina looked up.
Mikandra forced her face into a smile and entered the room. "A good morning to you, Eydrina."
Her tutor returned a weary smile. "You seem pretty cheerful for the fact that winter has started. It's not a very good morning, not by anyone's standard."
"Oh. Anything happened?"
"Just the usual, made ten times worse by the weather."
"What do you want me to do?"
Eydrina gave her a long list of patients to be looked at, to wash, change bandages and clean wounds, to prepare for operations—most of them involving old men having part of their legs removed. A woman with a dreadful cough needed massage and hot compresses on her back to help her clear her lungs. Some patients needed to be moved to other sections of the hospital. The maramarang victims needed to have their wounds cleaned out with a solution that stung badly. Mikandra dealt with a cantankerous old man and a slightly younger man who had claw marks all through his hair. She had to shave it, very carefully, before she could wash his skin. The hair was disgusting and so full of filth that she couldn't see where his head started and his hair stopped. She nicked him twice, because he was involved with an argument with the man in the next bed—with scratch marks all over his face—and woul
dn't sit still. Apparently, a fight about a sleeping spot had put both of them in the path of a horde of the scavengers. They were about the size of a baby and had big fur-covered wings with huge claws that they used to rip their prey but that served just as well for opening rubbish bins. They were hotbeds for disease.
Mikandra washed, massaged, cleaned, re-bandaged.
Kitchen staff brought breakfast, which some patients needed help to eat. Some didn't eat at all. New patients were seen by the emergency healers, of which Eydrina was the leader, and brought into the ward unless they needed a surgeon's immediate attention.
It was busy. It was cold. It was tiring and depressing.
Mikandra couldn't help thinking that as Trader she could bring so many things that would make these people's lives better. She would bring in money for Miran so that hospitals could buy the best medicines and equipment. The best people even.
That was if gamra would lift the boycott that had been in place since the Barresh two-day war.
Of course she could also make things better while staying here, if she really cared. She could lobby the rich Endri families for money to have windows put into the ward—
—except glass was imported from Barresh and none was coming in because of the boycott—
She could find another supplier. Surely someone on the east coast could make glass.
And she could ask for donations for further medical supplies—
—whichever ones didn't fall under the boycott, which weren't many.
It all came back to that boycott.
That problem was much bigger than her and she couldn't fix it.
So what about something she could fix, like the lives of patients.
What if she asked Liseyo to put on a theatre performance to cheer up the patients? That would be a nice thing to do. She could see Liseyo in her role, playing the ladies of the past, her little face smiling. Wasn't life about making the people you loved happy?
Was running away really the best solution?
* * *
Somewhere around midday, the emergency nurses brought into the ward an old man whom Mikandra had seen several times before. He was tall as her father but thin like a skeleton. He usually shaved his head—badly, because his scalp was marked with scabs from where he'd cut himself, but he had no army tattoos or other markings that gave him away as Nikala. On an earlier visit, he had given his name as Leitho. That was a typical Endri name, and he had both the build and the language to be of her class, but she'd checked and there was no Leitho in the Mirani register who was of the right age, and no Endri families admitting to having lost a family member of similar age who was now living on the streets.
This time he'd come in because he had scraped the skin off the top of his nose and cheekbone. A wound above his eye oozed sticky fluid into his eye. The skin around it was tight and swollen.
In line with her determination to be cheerful, Mikandra forced a smile when she went to his bed. "Here you are again."
"Ye—ye—yeah. 'm a bit clumsy in old age." His lips were cracked with the dry air and flaky from frost exposure.
"It looks like you have a nasty fall on your face."
"I fell down the stairs. You know, between the city office and the guard headquarters."
Mikandra nodded. She knew the stairs. They got very slippery after frost. "Did you hurt anything else?"
"Just my head. On the railing."
Was there a railing? She couldn't remember. "It looks nasty."
The wound above his right eyebrow looked at least several days old.
She got some warm water and disinfectant to wash the wound. Eydrina would have to glue the sides of the cut together.
While she washed his face, he constantly moved some part of his body. His arm shivered, his leg jiggled, he waggled his head from side to side and she had to tell him to keep still. Which he couldn't.
When she had first come to the hospital, Eydrina had warned her about this. Don't pay any attention to all the old guys constantly waggling and jiggling or it will drive you crazy. The cause of the jiggling was pretty obvious from the smell of him.
His foul body odour was laced with the distinctive sweetness of menisha brew. The orange tinge of the whites of his eyes confirmed the build-up of poison in his body. His arms had withered to sticks covered with paper-thin skin with irregular red blotching that would flake in dry frosty weather. Late stage menisha poisoning. He would probably not see the end of low winter.
She poured water in a glass and added a spoonful of powder that would help his body rid itself of some of the poisons, although a proper detoxification would take days and days of drinking a weak solution every day.
Annoyingly, his addiction also meant that she could not use menisha extract to help kill his infection. It was one of the few medicines still available without restriction; the fungus grew in the gorges region of the Mirani highlands and needed no import permits.
She mixed the powder in the glass. The fluid went milky. "Before I send you to the surgeon, I want you to drink this for me." She held up the glass.
His face showed disgust. "I don't need that. My head needs fixing. I am doing fine everywhere else."
"You have to drink this before the surgeon can fix your head."
He pushed himself sideways on the bed, trying to climb out. "If you're going to be like that, I'm leaving. I don't want that stuff."
"Your wound is infected and needs to be stitched before the infection gets any worse and you get seriously sick or worse."
"Why does everyone tell me I'll die?" His voice rose into a squeak.
"You will, if you don't stop drinking. Your body is breaking down because of the poison. Your eyes are orange. You're smart enough to know what that means."
He did not meet her eyes, but did not protest either. He took the glass in trembling hands, glancing at the tray next to his bed. "You'll bring the bowl?" The fluid in the glass sloshed around with his jiggling.
"All here."
He brought the cup carefully to his mouth, but experienced a shaking attack halfway and spilled some of the medicine on his disgusting shirt. He took a careful sip and winced. "This stuff makes me see things, you know?"
"That's why we keep you here while you drink it." Yes, she knew. The hallucinations were caused by withdrawal from the menisha poison. Incidentally, Endri suffered much worse with both the drunkenness and withdrawal from menisha poisoning.
She sat with him until he'd finished the concoction, then dragged a screen curtain around his bed and gave him the bowl. By the time she left him alone, he had already pissed out a quantity of bright orange fluid.
"It burns," he whispered, his voice hoarse. His eyes were wide and definitely more orange than they had been during his last visit.
"It burns, it burns!"
"I know. You should to try to—"
He gasped. "Like evil. We're surrounded by evil. Listen to me. The people running this city are evil. They hold us as prisoners. They know the ancestors' secrets, but they are keeping the secrets from us. You're a girl from one of the Endri. The council will listen to you. You must go to the council and demand that we be freed. Some of us have gone over to the other side."
"Sure, I will do that." She patted his hand.
Always agree with them, Eydrina had instructed her. The men were bound to become violent if caught in an argument while having hallucinations, and there were already enough fights in the wards without deliberately adding to them.
"You must free me. They come at night and take me to the room with the glass vials. They will pour ice over me. They stick things in me. You must help me."
"Yes, I will help you. That's what I'm for."
He grabbed her arm. "Listen to me. Promise me."
"Yes, I promise to help you."
She felt sorry for him and hoped he found the strength to fight whatever demons inhibited his mind. This vile drink ruined so many lives. Why had no one banned it yet?
Mikandra pushed the
curtain aside to leave him alone in his agony and continued with the other patients.
And all the while, her forced cheerfulness couldn't stop her mind churning over the choice she must make soon, and every time she thought about it, she changed her mind. She was selfish to accept, because, awful as this place was, people needed her here.
But she wanted to be useful to Miran, and while being in the hospital looked useful and a good thing to do, all they did in the wards was treating recurring problems that would simply go away if only these people could afford to heat their homes. Heating required money, and money required a job. Traders needed an office and support staff. They provided a lot of employment in the city. They provided goods. They made huge financial contributions to the council. And the Mirani Traders were the top of the Trader Guild. They were the lifeblood of a city like Miran, and had always been. Miran needed Traders. The Trader Guild considered the Miran chapter of its organisation too old-fashioned and quaint. So the Mirani chapter had accepted her, a non-traditional choice, a sign that they were willing to make changes. She should act on the trust that the Guild wanted to put in her.
But Liseyo . . .
And so her mind went around and around in circles.
Chapter 4
Some time towards the end of the day, Mikandra sat down for a precious moment of rest. She poured tea from Eydrina's red and gold teapot and took it to the tall stool in the corner of the emergency room where a window looked out over the city.
There she sat hunched over, with her frozen hands clamped around the cup, savouring the warmth of the tea seeping through the glass. The wind had died and grey, fuzzy clouds hung so low that they obscured the watchtower. The many roofs squished together inside the city walls were normally red, but the mist and the impending dusk rendered everything in soft grey-laced colours. In a way, it was pretty.
Where she sat inside the hospital, nothing was pretty. The old man Leitho had collapsed after a bout of vomiting and had been taken into the hospital with urgency. Mikandra was afraid to ask about him, because he would probably not come out again. A couple of war veterans had almost become involved in a punch-up. One of them had brought a bottle of menisha brew inside his cloak and nurses had a very hard time trying to get it off him while he was drunk.