Jim Baen's Universe Volume 1 Number 5

by Eric Flint

  The pastel houses of Alhasa nestled in layers on the steep slopes of the plateau. Narrow lanes twisted between them like the elaborate braids of young girls. Slender streams of smoke rose from kitchen stoves to disperse before the sharp morning breeze. Tiny figures moved among the vineyards and gardens, and below everything was the sheer drop to the sea. The water was almost always shrouded by a layer of cloud below the great cliff. On rare occasions, the clouds would part to allow the Alhasi a brief and dizzying view of distant green water.

  In the days of the flyers, people had sailed above the oceans, but those days were lost. The Alhasi had learned to be content with their hilltop city, their terraced farms. Pursil grew on the heights, and snow grapes, and gisko berries, and a dozen other herbs to soothe, to heal, to nourish. The herbs of Alhasa were prized by the lowland people, who traded grain and tools and cloth for them.

  But now, it seemed the Callistans were no longer content with the system of barter. Threats had been made, speeches and rallies had been stated. Alhasa's Chamber had sent Romas to the blind lama to discover what he could see.

  Angkar Rinposh pulled up his scarlet cowl to block the bite of the wind from his bare head. "Courier," he said.

  "Yes, Holiness."

  "It is not good news."

  "What shall I tell the Chamber, Holiness?"

  "Tell them they are coming. The Callistans are coming, with their shou dan and their spears. They are going to block the Spiral Road."

  * * *

  Callis City

  Irlen braced her hands on the pitted iron balustrade and leaned forward to see past the gray-tiled rooftops. The dry wind stung the tip of her nose and chilled the rusting rail under her fingers. Fronds of hair whipped across her face, and she lifted one hand to hold them out of her eyes. "Do you see that, Old Man?" she said. "It grows smaller every year."

  Her shadowy companion nodded. "Like a stale cake being eaten by rats," he said. "Crumbling away."

  The skeleton shapes of the ever-diminishing spaceport loomed just beyond the city, its collapsed platforms and broken passenger tubes jutting into the twilit sky like the limbs of a massive dead tree. For years scavengers had been carting off bits of it, raiding the carcass to make cart tongues out of tower struts, chimney pots out of storage cartons, water pipes out of conduits. Irlen had never seen the Callis Spaceport before its terminals had been gutted, its observation decks toppled, but there was a vintage picture at Li Paul House, an actual photograph, from the days when such things were possible.

  "What are you thinking, daughter?" her companion said.

  "That we remember our history, yet fail to learn from it."

  "Not so many remember, now."

  "I suppose not. They're too busy surviving."

  "That is human nature, my daughter."

  "Does it never change, then, Old Man?"

  His gesture was so familiar, the graceful lifted hands, the elegant tilted head, that a spasm of loneliness twisted in her breast. He said, with a laugh, "Perhaps when the ships come back."

  She could not bring an answering smile to her lips. "That's such a stupid saying."

  "The General says it all the time."

  Irlen rolled her eyes, and he gave her a sympathetic look.

  "You should go home, daughter. You're no good to your patients if you're exhausted."

  "But it is exhausting," she said tiredly. "The wounded come back from the Spiral Road every day now, and we are stretched to the breaking point. There are few enough physicians in Callis City. I'm the only one these children have, and I'm about to lose a patient."

  "Doctors lose patients. I taught you that much, surely."

  "This one is so young—and we don't even know her name."

  "You're doing all you can, daughter. I know that."

  She gave him a sideways look. "You know everything now, I suppose."

  His smile twisted a little, rueful and wise. "Not always a blessing."

  Her throat tightened. She had not been able to shake a pervasive sense of isolation, ever since his death. "I wish you were here, Old Man."

  He shrugged, and his image wavered before her weary eyes. "Here I am," he whispered. "Here I am."

  In the ward behind her, a child began to wail. Irlen turned to leave the narrow balcony, her black vestment whipping around her legs until she closed the balcony doors.

  The matron met her, rubbing her hands on her long apron. "Doctor Li Paul," she said. "The girl is worse—she's so hot."

  "Did you rub her with grain alcohol?"

  The matron nodded, her eyes weary, her face lined with worry.

  "Did you ask the apothecary for pursil leaf?"

  "I asked. He says he needs what little he has for the wounded from the war."

  Irlen pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead in a helpless gesture. "War," she said bitterly. "Young men wounded, maimed, killed—and for what?"

  The matron pursed her lips, and looked disapproving. "Doctor," she said, "we had no choice. Those Alhasi, they're barbarians. They practice all sorts of abominations. Do you know what they do with babies they don't want? They throw them over that cliff into the sea!"

  Irlen dropped her hands and fixed the matron with a hard gaze. "How do you know any of that, Matron?"

  The other woman shrugged. "Everyone knows it. The General told us."

  Irlen went to the sink and began to wash her hands. "I would be happy if half what the General says is true," she muttered, but fortunately the matron didn't hear.

  Irlen took a fresh cloth and the bottle of grain alcohol, and crossed to the child's bedside.

  There were a dozen beds in the children's ward, and every one was full. Murmurs and whimpers filled the darkness. Often a parent came with their child, if they could be spared from home, and the matrons were grateful for their help. But this child, the one Irlen knelt beside now, had come alone, carried in the strong arms of one of the General's Guards. He had found her lying in the doorway of a bakery. Irlen had been grateful to him for bringing the girl to the hospital. Many another man would have left the child to die where she was.

  They called it crystal fever, and a urine sample soon confirmed that the nameless child had it. Tiny crystals shone in the beaker, showing that the girl's kidneys had already failed, that septicemia had set in. The little one appeared to be about four years of age, and she was the classic example of a crystal fever victim, poor, young, undernourished, and abandoned.

  Irlen reached in the pocket of her vestment for her ancient stethoscope, the one that had been her father's, and his father's before him, all the way back to the ships. She carefully unwound its cloth wrapping, and put its earpieces in her ears.

  The silvery metal of the earpieces and the cup never degenerated, which was a blessing, since the forges of Callis were incapable of such fine work, and the necessary metals were rarely available. Irlen kept the tubing of her heirloom functional by using pond reeds. Some used finely split leather, which lasted longer, but was not as flexible.

  Irlen bent her head to listen to the little girl's faltering heartbeat. Gently, she pinched the skin on the child's hand. It formed a tiny tent that collapsed only slowly, evidence of the dehydration that came with crystal fever. There was nothing to be done about it. Without a dose of pursil leaf to suppress the fever and ease the pain, the child's jaws grew tighter and tighter, until she could no longer swallow the fluids Irlen and the matron tried to trickle into her mouth.

  Irlen sat back on her heels to rewrap her stethoscope, and then stayed there, watching the child try to breathe. At one time physicians could replace lost fluid in their patients, pump it directly into their veins, but Callis had lost that technique. The arid plain of Callis held sulphur and graphite, but no iron, no copper; the Callistans could make their nasty little shou dan, hand bombs; they couldn't make needles.

  Irlen wished with all her being that she could think of something else to do.

  One of the things Callis wanted from Alhasa was free a
ccess to pursil leaf, to the sweet wine made from ice grapes, to the other herbs the Alhasi cultivated, and that would not grow on the dry plains. The General could claim that the war was about the "reunion" of their peoples, that he had a moral imperative for attacking Alhasa; Irlen had no doubt he had simply decided trade was too slow, and too costly. Morality had nothing to do with it, and profit everything. There was no profit, naturally, in saving the life of a nameless child of the streets.

  Irlen thrust these useless thoughts aside. She put a hand on the sick girl's tangled hair. "It won't be long now, little one," she whispered. "I'm sorry. But I'll be right here. I won't leave you, I promise."

  As she waited, she let her gaze stray to the window that looked out on the balcony and the dark night. Her companion was there, a foggy form watching through the glass. Irlen nodded to him, tucked away the stethoscope he had left her, and waited for the girl to die.

  * * *

  The nightly caravan of wounded soldiers arrived an hour after the child drew her last breath. Irlen was called to the trauma room, and spent hours trying to mend arrow wounds, crushed bones, lacerated skin. It had been a long day and a longer night, and she was stunned to exhaustion by the weight of the work and the weeping of young men in pain. The last of the pursil leaf was gone before the Guards stopped carrying in stretchers. Irlen had to send away her blood-stained vestment before the night was out, and work on in a long apron like the one Matron wore.

  As she trudged back up the stairs to the children's ward, her companion returned, a faintly gray figure in the dimness of the stairwell. She grimaced at him. "It troubles me, Old Man. They go off to war expecting glory, and they come back shocked at how much glory hurts."

  "There is no good war," he said. "And no bad peace."

  "You're quoting again," Irlen sighed. "As usual, I remember the quote but not the author. From the time of the ships?"

  He gave her a ghostly smile. "The quote is much older than that. Benjamin Franklin, some pre-Industrial philosopher."

  "Ah. Well, he was right."

  "Every physician knows that," her companion said lightly. "It is politicians who don't believe it."

  "All I know," Irlen said wearily, reaching for the handle of the door to the ward, "is that without pursil leaf, and the other herbs we can get from Alhasa, this will be a primitive kind of medicine. We'll be cauterizing wounds with hot irons next."

  She went through the door, leaving him behind in the dark stairwell. She saw that the vacated bed had already been filled. Against the far wall of the ward, two parents stood with sick children in their arms.

  Irlen gritted her teeth against the wave of despair that swept her. If only . . . just a basket of pursil leaves, and a day in which to make the medicine . . . but the General had seen to it that wasn't possible.

  * * *

  Alhasa

  "Romas," his mother called. "There's a message for you."

  Romas turned away from contemplating the ruin of the stone arches that had protected the Spiral Road for years. It made his heart ache, that ruin. Early in the days when the Alhasi had parted from the Callistans, when they had determined to live in harmony with their new world, rather than yearn for their lost technology, they had carved the Spiral Road out of the living rock of the cliff, a great ribbon of road that wound up and around the immense plateau. To protect travelers on the middle reaches of the Road from the high winds blowing from the sea, and from toppling over into the abyss, the carvers had made tall, broad arches out of the rock, at the cost of thousands of hours of labor and not a few lives. And now the arches had been destroyed. It felt to Romas, and to all the Alhasi, like a betrayal of their ancestors.

  The city was quiet now, but throughout the night the sounds of war had shattered the darkness.

  "Romas!" his mother called again.

  "Coming, Ama la."

  He trailed his fingers across the pursil vines that grew over the door as he went in. His mother, her profusion of braids tucked neatly beneath her round linen cap, held out a small scroll marked with the seal of the sanctuary. "It's from him," she said, her eyes as round as her cap. "From Angkar Rinposh."

  Romas took the scroll, wondering at it. Why would the blind lama send a message to his home?

  "Open it!" his mother urged, her voice tight with anxiety. All the Alhasi were anxious these days, since the first Callistan assault on the Spiral Road had sent sparks and explosions high into the night sky, and collapsed the ancient arches. Bits of rock had gone crashing over the great cliff, bringing the Alhasi out of their homes to stare fearfully downward into the night. The Chamber had positioned archers to protect the city, but they could not stop the destruction of the arches. They shot their arrows at the Callistan soldiers, and the Callistans answered with spears and hand bombs. The screams of the injured carried up the twisting road to the city, and the Alhasi braced for a siege. A demand had been sent to the Chamber, some nonsense about setting the Alhasi "free"—a euphemism, every Alhasi knew, for taking control of their resources, the herbs and grapes that wouldn't grow on the plains. And the labor to harvest them!

  Romas unrolled the scroll. "The lama wants to see me, Ama la."

  "Go quickly, my son."

  Romas kissed her, and then dashed out into the steep street. He ran, hurrying toward the top of the city, where the sanctuary crowned the plateau. His sandals thumped on the hard ground, and his braid bounced over his shoulder. One or two people lifted their eyebrows at his swift passage, but most were in their houses, their doors and windows shut tight, preparing for the siege.

  * * *

  Callis City

  By the time Irlen left the children's ward, she was staggering with fatigue. Two more children had died, their mothers wailing over them as their ragged breathing ceased. Matron, and several other parents who had come to help, had struggled to comfort them, had wrapped the small bodies, tried to calm the other patients.

  The sun had risen on this chaos, red and dry. At least, for the moment, the flow of wounded soldiers had ceased, and the ones who had died were carried away. Irlen crept down the stairs to find a rickshaw, and almost fell asleep as it carried her to Li Paul House. She refused food, wanting only to collapse upon her own bed for the first time in thirty-six hours.

  Her companion was not there. He usually followed her home, to haunt the old halls and the library where he had spent so many hours. They were empty now. No one lived in Li Paul House but Irlen and her housekeeper.

  Irlen was too tired to notice his absence. She fell immediately into a heavy, hot sleep.

  When her housekeeper woke her, it was almost dark again. She ate a hasty meal, and set out again for the hospital, grateful for the coolness of the night air. In the distance, the abandoned spaceport hulked beneath the stars. Oil lamps glimmered here and there in the city.

  Irlen climbed wearily out of the rickshaw, feeling as if she had hardly rested at all. She moved slowly up the stairs, reluctant to face the renewed tragedies, the ceaseless need.

  Not until she pushed open the door, and reached for her vestment, did she remember that she had not seen her companion since the night before. She stopped, the vestment in her hands, and looked back at the stairwell. "Where are you, Old Man?" she murmured. "You wouldn't abandon me now, surely?"

  There was no answer.

  * * *

  Alhasa

  This time, when Romas came into the presence of the blind lama, the two of them were alone. The novice who escorted him into the sanctuary pressed his hands together before his chest, bowed, and was gone. Romas walked alone down the aisle to the center of the sanctuary, where the censer smoked beneath the dome. Angkar Rinposh sat there alone, crosslegged, his blind eyes following the sounds of Romas's footsteps.

  Romas knelt before him. "You sent for me," he said, a little hoarsely. The pursil smoke hung heavily in the air, a cloud of gray tinged with brown.

  "I had a vision in the night," the lama said. He squinted at Romas as if he could see him th
rough the smoke.

  Romas fidgeted. It was said the lama saw more than any sighted person. It was said that he could see into your soul. His eyes, milky blue and ghostly, made Romas feel small and transparent. "Yo—your Holiness," he stammered.

  "Yes, a vision," Rinposh said again. His blank gaze wandered away from Romas and up to the dome above the sanctuary. "I saw a tunnel—little more than a fissure, really—running through the ruin of the arches. And I saw you there. With a woman."

  Romas felt his cheeks flame. "Your Holiness," he said, his voice quavering a little. "I am a courier. I would never take a woman—not to the arches—there's a war, Holiness."