Faren and I ran downstairs as fast as we could. Geraln was somewhere behind us. We came to the ground level, and he was doubled over the rail above us panting for breath. He pointed out the front door. "The constable… is outside!"
We raced beneath the ornate, stained-glass rosette, its colors dulled by candlelight and darkness outside.
A loud squawk.
Another one of those lizard-riding girls with the blue silk armbands found us. The lizard creature was upon us as we emerged from the doorway. My heart jumped at the sight of those teeth, but the girl on its back spoke to us before I could think. "Friend of Thisisweird?"
Faren and I nodded.
Her Herali had a thick accent, but we understood her. "He at medical place. This way."
She carried some kind of light on a stick, but it wasn't a torch; paper panes glowed brilliant white and didn't flicker even with the lizard carrying her at blistering speed through the darkness. Faren and I had no hope of keeping up. She stopped, looking back at us, only to move ahead as we caught up.
We sprinted past stacks of mud huts like dark domes on the right, with stone buildings like giant shadow monsters on the left. We raced through blurs of people towards the light, only for her to turn down another corner and race ahead.
And still we ran.
She stopped outside a long line of arches that sufficed for the ground floor of a building with a low amber coming from inside. I was winded, but Faren looked like he could keep running.
"He inside," the constable pointed. The lizard turned its head to point inside as well. There was no door, so we stepped through an arch.
We passed between two beds. On our left was a man with bandages wrapped around his head, with a large bundle of gauze secured to one side. On the right was a man who was naked but for a mass of bedsheets over his privates. His whole body was covered like one contiguous bruise from his head to his toes, and his skin sagged over his bones.
"Don't wake them!" a girl whispered from the side. She was one of the natives with the same dark-green skin and white hair, tall and lanky, and she couldn't have been more than thirteen.
Faren spoke first. "Is he—"
"Shh!" she snapped.
Davod, Kelint, and Rock crowded around a bed on the far corner of the medical ward, and they parted for us when we came close.
Ales was wrapped in white sheets with his back supported by several pillows. His head lay still to one side, his eyes were closed, and his chest lifted slowly up and down.
"What the hell happened?" Faren sat on the floor beside him.
Kelint answered. "Some kid was trying to take his coinpurse. Ales catches him, and some other kid knifes him in the back. This fucking place, man."
"Watch your mouth!" the girl shouted from halfway across the room.
Kelint shook his head and yawned. "I'm off to bed."
I looked Ales over. "Where did he get stabbed?"
Davod stood and reached over to show me. "That side."
He watched me in earnest while I knelt to study the wound.
I found a nearby candle and brought it close. To the left side behind his arm and around the area of his kidney was a line of scar with four sutures surrounded by round leech marks. My heart sank.
Davod looked intently at me. "What do you think?"
Crickets outside accompanied my thoughts. I felt the side of his neck, and he was hot. This was bad. "That's not a good place to get stabbed."
Rock huffed. "Where is good place? Is nowhere!"
Behind me, a woman approached.
She was one of the natives, average height, and had a flat face with soft, gentle yellow eyes. She wore her white hair in cornrows that hung down over her shoulders. Barely covering her generous bosom was a beige apron with some old, bronze stains that refused to wash out and several pockets with an assortment of instruments. She pointed at me. "Are you Faren?"
He answered. "That's me."
She gave him a come-hither with one finger, and he got up to follow her. Rock, Davod, and I went with him. She had a high-pitched girly voice that didn't match her age. "Can I talk to him alone, please?"
Faren closed his droopy eyes and shook his head. "Whatever you need to tell me, we can all hear it."
She looked at each of us and nodded. Behind her, that same girl did some stuff nearby. I couldn't tell what she was supposed to be doing, but I knew feigning chores when I saw it. "Here's where we're at. I saw some things in the wound that don't make me happy, but overall I'm optimistic. Right now he's sleeping, and that's the best thing for him. We should know more by morning."
Faren spoke to that. "Can I stay with him?"
The woman turned to the girl. "shamuni, ʃʊsi yudaseza zɪxefiŋuve? dima zɪxeze 'æki." She pointed at a bed beside Ales's.
While Rock and Davod were leaving, the woman with the girly voice stopped me. "Are you Caleb?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm Doctor zʊɣi."
"Nice to meet you."
"You were supposed to report to me earlier."
"Oh," I stood up straight. I didn't know what kind of trouble I was in.
"You will report to me first thing in the morning. Is that a problem?"
"No?"
"Good," she nodded and left. She peeked over her shoulder and added, "before breakfast."
***
"CALEB!" Geraln's whisper-scream cut through my sleep.
I woke drenched in sweat with purple hues flooding through the windows. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Geraln was on his back with a mass on his chest. Davod got up to look closer, as did Rock. It was that baby lizard creature that sniffed us all at the gate when we arrived.
Geraln lifted his head up and crossed his eyes to look. She had curled up with her tail and long neck wrapped around her body, and her tiny legs and forelimbs were tucked beneath. He lifted the creature up and down with each breath, and his fingers trembled as he cried. "Why is it here!"
Rock knelt low to get a closer look. "She sleep."
Geraln's voice quivered, "get it off me!"
The creature lifted her tiny head and yawned her mouth open, showing rows of needles top and bottom, then faced him and chirped.
Davod reached out his hands slowly. She watched his hands. As he drew closer, she started to tremble, then coiled her neck and snapped her tiny jaws close to his fingers. Davod jerked away, and the creature hissed at him. Then she turned her tiny face to Geraln once more and chirped.
"What do you want?" he pleaded.
I shrugged. "Have you tried sitting up?"
Geraln looked at me with his eyes wide. He took in a deep breath and let it out, then slowly propped up on his elbows while the thing stared at him. He kept raising up. Soon the creature jumped off him and onto the bed. He sat up completely and crossed his legs, rubbing his eyes.
The creature stood on gangly legs, snaked her long neck upwards to look at him, and chirped.
Someone laughed elsewhere in the barracks. It was another man, Herali, who'd watched with a smile on his face. "Yeah, you'll get used to those things."
"Get used to it!" Geraln huffed. "Have you woken up with one of them sleeping on you?"
The man cocked his head and grinned. "Nope." He then stretched his arms and torso, rolling his neck around in all directions. On one shoulder he had a tattoo of Cougar with His mouth open wide in a roar.
I asked, "how long have you been here?"
"About a month. Let me tell you this, though…" he stood and donned a loincloth like the ones the native women all wore, except he had a sword hanging from his belt on one side with a knife on the other. He also wore a leather strap over one shoulder for his bow and arrows. "Whatever you do, don't pull a weapon on them."
Davod raised an eyebrow in my direction.
"Wait until you see what the females do!" another man added.
The Cougar man chuckled and shook his head. The rest of us listened.
"To get the male's attention, Ahmi says she has to show off how vicious she is. When that happens, find yourself a nice, comfortable distance!"
Kelint sat up on the top bunk across from us, rubbed his hands over his baby face, and asked his countryman, "you see any action?"
"Yeah, man." The Cougar shook his head. "It's scary out there. They train you, but honestly, training in the yard with spears and shit, that's a waste of time. Out there in the jungle, that's not what you'll be facing. You could be walking on the road, and arrows come out at you from nowhere. You just run. Turn around, half the men you went out with don't come back and all you can do is move on like it's nothing. There were four of us called up from my village, six more from the village over. I'm the only one left."
"Why is that happening?" I asked.
Geraln added, "are they only pulling men from Heralia? Where's the Imperial army?"
The baby lizard sitting on his lap faced the man and chirped.
He huffed. "Probably in Kulun fighting the important war; we make due with what we've got. Those native bows don't get better than fifty yards, so we got 'em there. Thing is, them eupin bows, that's a hell of a trophy. So if they catch you unaware, who you think they're going to take out first?"
I glanced at my bow, at the etching of Bear and Cougar fighting over the golden acorns while Falcon cried, and wondered if some enemy took it as a trophy, would they know the story behind it? Would they wonder? We'd all decorated Geraln's bow with ancient Herali runes that fell out of use after the conquest and spelled out the last line of Falcon's Epic, for every flower a place to bloom. If they took that as a trophy, who would read it? Geraln sat cross-legged with the creature in his lap looking up into his face while he looked down, and I felt a stabbing pain in my heart that something could happen to him.
Beneath thick clouds and punishing heat and humidity, the rest of my friends went to breakfast. I had to report to the doctor hungry, so I went to the long, stone building sandwiched between the mess hall and the three-story administration building where we'd given our names. Most of the archways that sufficed for a wall had monstrous, very nasty-looking spiders across them. Unwilling to cross them, I had to go down a few before I found one I could enter.
Inside, muted morning light filled the room along with a finger of sharp smoke from some herb burning in a crucible beside the man with the sunken, bruised body. He lay still with his mouth and eyes open. A fly landed on his eye, and he didn't blink.
A girl was bathing another man with a rag from a small washbasin. She was a plump dark-skinned native wearing a blue silk loincloth with silver embroidery, and couldn't have been older than Teryn back home.
Faren was asleep, and Ales lay still with his eyes closed. His chest rose and fell with a slow rhythm. Hanging from a hook at the end of his bed was a wooden slate with a piece of paper with columns of tall, vertical scratch-like writing just like I'd seen elsewhere in the city.
It was difficult to make out in the dim morning light, but the site of the wound had swollen and turned red. His fever raged.
"dowisatesa!" The high-pitched, girly voice of Dr zʊɣi emerged from my right.
"Uh… maybe?"
She giggled lightly. "It's how we say 'good morning.'"
"Oh." I still didn't understand why I couldn't eat first.
"This way," she said. Then she addressed the girl. "besami, ʃʊsi ʒʊʃave 'æki."
The young girl nodded and kept at what she was doing.
There were several folded-wooden partitions at the end of the bed area; one of them was decorated with painted handprints of all sizes and colors. Zughi led me towards a room of sorts with two walls being open archways looking outside, and those accordion partitions for the other two. There were two tables. A taller one had an array of tools and implements. The other was small and short with several plates and bowls with food in them, and there were large, stuffed bags on each side.
She sat down on one of the bags. "Please. Have a seat."
I sat on the other bag chair facing a large, flat, wooden bowl with five colors of goop arranged like slices of a pie. There was light-green chunky stuff that smelt strong of coriander, smooth brown stuff, white stringy goop swimming in oil, a red sauce that smelled like a toxic amount of nice pepper, and some chopped medley of colors with bits of green flecks mixed in. At the center of the table was a large bowl with thin, yellow, crispy flat cakes.
"Thank you," I said, "but this is all…"
"Let's start with what experience you do have." She picked up one of the crispy things, dipped a mass of green stuff from her plate, and crunched into it, watching my eyes as she chewed.
"Well… uh… OK. Look, I appreciate this, but I'm really not qualified for any…"
"Whether or not you're qualified is my decision, not yours. I asked about your experience." She took another flat cake and scooped from a different color on her plate.
Watching her eat was making me hungry. I took a crisp and dipped it into the brown stuff. It was salty with a buttery texture, and paired well with the satisfying crunch of the flatbread thingy.
"I was raised in the church in Gath. The Daenma church, sorry. The friar's wife, Mother Searnie, she was a midwife. Then the Great Plague happened, and they said to her, you're a doctor now. She brought my best friend Sarina to the orphanage as an infant; her parents died of the plague and she barely survived… sorry, that's not what you asked about, is it?"
My next bite came from the white cheesy stuff. When I lifted the flatbread, strings of cheese glistening in oil stretched out and wouldn't break no matter how high I lifted the thing. I couldn't remember the last time I tasted a cheese so rich. Zughi dipped her next one in the green stuff and the cheese, and cut the strands with her teeth.
"I helped out, basically. Whenever someone in the village couldn't afford a doctor, they came to the church, and we did what we could for them."
"What did you do, specifically?"
"You name it. Last year she cut out a kid's appendix; I helped her with that. This one guy passed out drunk and burned his house down, he was burned real bad. Lots of little things: aches, pains, sick stomach, you name it. Sometimes she'd shoo me away when a woman came in."
"Have you ever tied a splint?"
"Oh, yeah. One time, my friends and I were in the mountains, and Ryoen, he's this kid I grew up with, he didn't get conscripted so he's still back home. Anyway he fell pretty bad and broke his leg. We found some sticks, I tore my shirt into strips."
Dr Zughi took another chip from the center and studied the options on her plate. "Ever tie a tourniquet?"
"Uh… I know how to. In theory."
She smirked and loaded up her chip with a good amount of red sauce, held it up to her forearm, and dragged it across, allowing the sauce to ooze all over her skin. "Look! I'm bleeding!"
"Huh?"
She picked up more red sauce and dumped it all over her forearm. "Oh, that's a lot of blood! I'm definitely going to die."
"OK," I sat up and looked around the table. I needed a tourniquet. I saw bowls, cups, and a copper pitcher. We each had a small, wet rag to wipe our fingers, but I needed something much longer. "Uh…"
She glanced at the other table where all the tools were laid out. There was an array of small knives, clips, clamps, cloths, rags, paper satchels of stuff, rolls of gauze, and a thick glass rod the size of a thumb.
"Uhh…" her voice quivered. "The light, I can see it!" She lifted one hand to her forehead, still holding out her wounded arm. "Mother in heaven, I have sinned! I ate way too much cake last night. And the night before that, and the night before that…"
That made me laugh. I found a strip of cloth next to a metal stick and started wrapping her arm.
"Away from the joint."
"Sorry." I adjusted it.
She continued to act delirious while I wrapped several layers around her arm and put the rod in place. "... no regrets. Except that one guy; he was so fine. I don't know if I regret hitting it, or not hitting it twice?"
That got me laughing so hard I needed a moment to settle down.
"If you think that's distracting, try doing this while getting shot at."
Right. I shook it off and finished wrapping, twisting the stick around to tighten it.
She winced.
"Sorry…"
I couldn't get over her girlish voice. "Don't apologize; you just saved my life."
I looked around for something to clean the wound with, and found a wad of gauze. When I was done, she turned her arm to look at it, nodded, and undid the tourniquet. "Seriously, though, those maple-cream cakes you people have… we haven't gotten maple here since we lost the Gate to Hell. Come over here."
I followed her to the array of tools.
She picked up a long, steel, looked like a miniature spatula with a groove in the center. "Use this to pull arrowheads. You'll have to feel your way around, but keep the shaft in this groove. Even with the puller, the barbs can do a lot of damage on their way out so remember the rule: if it breaks the skin on the exit, snap the shaft and push it the rest of the way through. Always look at the entry wound. If you don't see cuts on the side, that's a piercer. They go through armor but they're not barbed. Those you can pull straight out."
I swallowed. I wasn't ready for all this.
She tapped a finger into my chest. "If you pull the arrow and the broadhead doesn't come with it, don't try to extract it in the field. Tie him to a stretcher and bring him back here."
She held up something that looked like a dart with a small pouch on one end. "Darts kill no matter where they hit. Arm, leg, anywhere. Once the venom gets inside the body, you will have two very painful minutes. Take one of these and slam it into their chest hard. The needle must go through the breastplate; break a bone if you have to. And don't play with this, either. Without the venom to counteract it, the antivenin will kill you much, much worse."
My mind swirled. "Look, I don't know if I can do this. I'm not a real medic. I don't have any real training…"
"So, you're a boy?"
That took me aback. "No?"
"A boy isn't qualified. A man steps up to responsibility. Which one are you?"
Looking over all these tools, half of them I'd never used, the other half I'd never seen.
Zughi smiled and rested her hand on my arm. "I don't need you to do a brain transplant or give anybody four arms."
Do what?
"What I need you to do is patch them up well enough to bring them back here. Do you think you're man enough for that?"
I furrowed my brow.
"Here," she handed me an empty leather satchel. "I want you to know where everything is, so you're going to pack it up. Let me get you some fresh gauze."
The young chubby girl appeared at the edge of the wooden partition. "And five awake that friend here."
Zughi nodded and went with her. The girl lowered her eyes and smiled at me before leaving.
And this was what I had to look forward to. What if it were Davod? What if he took an arrow to the gut, would I have the courage to extract it? What if I failed, and my best friend died under my care? Father in Heaven, I don't know if I can do this.
I finished packing and came out to the common area where Geraln, Davod, Rock, Kelint, and Northstar had all gathered around Faren and Ales.
Ales was on the fifth cot between two archways, propped up and awake. Faren sat next to him. Geraln sat on the other side, and Dr zʊɣi leaned in to study the wound while the baby lizard creature followed her every move.
"How are you feeling?" she said.
Ales grumbled low. "I'm freezing. Can I get some blankets."
"Hold still." She took a glass crystal cylinder from a pocket in her apron just like the one I'd put away in my satchel and touched it to the side of his neck. The thing changed color. First a dark, cloudy purple appeared, then blue, then green, yellow, and continued to shift until it settled on a shade somewhere between orange and red.
"Sorry, no blankets for you. Watch my finger."
His head fell back on the pillow.
"No, no!" she slapped the side of his shoulder. "Wake up, you don't get to sleep until we're done. Sit up. I promise if you do everything I tell you, I'll get you some chocolate."
Geraln looked around and mouthed, what's chocolate? We all shrugged.
Ales wrestled his head up. He fixed his dark-green eyes on her, blinking several times over.
"Watch my finger."
He tried. She moved it right, left, up and down, and he struggled. Then his head nearly fell back on the pillow, but he held it up and shook his meaty face.
"Does it hurt everywhere?" she said.
"Yeah," he wheezed out.
I knelt to look at the wound. The cut was small, but the entry was swollen, and purple bruises beneath ran deep. A line of white pus seeped out from between sutures.
Sepsis.
He would be dead in a matter of hours, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
"besami," the doctor turned to the girl behind her. "ʃʊsi zeŋæse gebu'i."
My heart broke. They'd said this place was a death trap, but that didn't prepare me for this. It couldn't be this easy. It wasn't fair. Ales didn't do anything. I couldn't breathe. Looking around my friends, I didn't know what to say to them. I didn't know what to say to myself.
The girl came back with a jar full of some whitish liquid. The doctor handed it to him, but he shook his head in desperation.
"It's only half as much as I gave you last night. Take it."
Ales chuckled, though it hurt him, and he reached for the jar. That face he made when he started drinking spoke volumes.
Faren eyed it with suspicion. "What is that?"
zʊɣi answered. "gebu'i."
Geraln asked, "what's gebu'i?"
I answered. "It's that crap I gave Dune."