IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume
II: Tests of Fire and Blood
Chapter 6 Nursing Wednesday, April 22, 2708,
continued (Ooooooo. Pain causes the nausea. Nausea causes the thirst. Thirst causes the pain. The bed, too soft and warm, nauseates
me. The floor, too hard and cold under
bare feet as I run to the bathroom, worsens the pain. Randy
waits just outside the bathroom door, staring at me oddly as he hands me a cool
glass of water. His hair looks painfully
red to me, but the water tastes sweet compared to the sourness in my
mouth. It makes me feel slightly better. “You
slept the day away,” he says, “And no surprise.” “And
you,” I say, trying to remember anything that could precede so much misery, “spent
the night.” “It's
my home, Jake. You're in my home. I had invited you over for dinner.” I
look around blearily, trying to force my eyes to focus. “Oh yeah.”
What the devil is wrong with me, anyway?
Have I caught some sort of bug? “You
needed looking after, anyway” he grumbles, but his hand feels firm on my arm as
he guides me out to the couch—stronger than me right now, though I’m the one
with all the muscle and the height. Once
he settles me in, he sits on the couch arm and informs me, “I'd invited you
over for dinner. I had fixed us a nice
pasta dish, with sausage in a vegetable sauce that I’d found in an old
cookbook. It seemed to call for wine, so
I bought some for the occasion. You
ignored my pasta, and finished off the entire bottle.” “I...”
I stop massaging my forehead and look at him.
“I did what?” “After
that you drank every beer in the refrigerator.
You once swore you'd never again touch castavín, but you did last night;
you drank all that I had. And the
cooking wine. That would be the sherry,
the bordeaux, the pinot noir, and a bit of brandy that I like to use on
desserts. If they'd have been full
bottles it would probably have killed you.
Oh, I almost forgot, a small flask of scotch that I had bought for
another recipe I'd found, saving it for later on in the week—for 'drunken
chicken', ironically enough. And then
you polished off every flavoring in the spice cabinet. When you'd finished with that, you chugged
down my bottle of cough syrup before I could stop you. And throughout all this, to top it off, I
don't know where you found it, but you smoked a cigar. Dusty old thing—maybe the last tenant lost
it.” We blink at each other a moment
before he says, “I've never seen you smoke before, Weed.” “Did
I, uh, say anything as to why? Did I
hear bad news or something?” “Not
at all. In fact, you laughed a great
deal. You kept shouting for joy, that we
are all one. You repeated that a
lot. We are all one, egalitarian, and
stuff like that. I don't know how you
even pronounced egalitarianism, but you seemed to like the word. Oh yeah, and dancing. You tried to dance. You fell.
Frequently. When the headache
wears off I expect you'll discover the bruises.” Instinctively,
I turn towards the trash-box by the door.
I see the splintered legs of an end-table poking up out of it. I glance to my right—yep, the one by the
couch doesn't stand there anymore. “Randy,
I... I am so sorry. Okay, that doesn't
do much good. But...if I knew why...I
just don't get it, Randy.” I look at him
plaintively. He
slides down off the arm to nestle in beside me.
“Well, it's not like you make a habit of this sort of thing. I'm just happy you didn't knock yourself into
an alcoholic coma. You scared me half to
death!” Then he puts his arms around me,
very gently, and I reciprocate, holding onto his solidity, nestling him under
my chin. “When I fell in love with an
oracle, I knew we'd have strange days now and then. I signed on for the unexpected.”) * * * Feeling like we should
admit ourselves as patients, Malcolm, Rashid, and I make our rounds among the
sick and wounded. It goes so much faster
with three--just as well, as far as we've fallen behind schedule. At this rate, though, we might soon qualify
as a real infirmary. Malcolm's pallor as
he moves from mat to mat doesn't entirely have to do with last night's
excesses. I make a comment on how much
things have improved since Rashid and I got here, and he goes dead-white. It feels weird to just go
back to work as if nothing changed. My
neck feels cool, naked without the collar, without the sweat that used to
always build up under it. But other than
that, the same people ask the same things of me--few of them even know that I
hadn't been free all along. As I help Malcolm roll up
Mischa's mat till the next patient needs it, he says, "Did you know that
the murderer's father loves the poor?"
He snorts derisively. "What
a fool I've been--what a sorry, naive fool!" "I could've said the
same," I confess. "And I came
to the Charadoc at least as idealistically as you." We carry the mat between us like a body; I
kind of feel like we put Mischa away.
Rashid and I spent more time with Mischa than anybody, but we can't take
still more time away from the wounded to attend her funeral. That's just the way it goes, sometimes. "You know," Malcolm
says, "I didn't have to join last night.
Cyran told me I could stay here in the infirmary as a respected captive,
or even as a noncombatant doctor, beyond all politics, as I'd always
done." He huffs to wrestle the
rolled-up mat into the old cloakroom closet where we store such things. "But Mischa..." Rashid brings us more of
that tea of his, just as Malcolm thumps his weight into the mat and gets it all
the way in. "Thanks, Rashid,"
I tell him. "This stuff really does
seem to help. You'll teach me the
recipe?" "Sure. And Deirdre, uh, thanks for last night...I
guess I..." "Don't mention
it." We kneel to change
dressings--this time with real gauze, courtesy of Malcolm. "Rashid, you're...well, you're just so
smart we all sometimes forget that you're still a child." I had a friend like that, once. Never lived long enough to shave. "The evening couldn't have gone any
other way." He empties a bedpan and
rinses it with scalding water into the biohazard bucket. "I don't think I've been a child since
they sent home my mother's finger. It
still had Papa's wedding ring on it." Malcolm says, "Believe
it or not, they thought of themselves as gentlemen to leave it on. They fancied themselves gallant." "I still have
it." He pulls from his shirt the
chain that I had always assumed held some sort of religious medal, but it
clasps a silver band. "Sometimes I
feel like she watches over me." (And does she know that I killed her? She must!) He comes over and helps me
change the sheet under the kid with the left thigh wound while Malcolm unloads
supplies from his truck into shelves that used to hold books. "Anyway, the evening didn't end the same
for everybody,” Rashid says. “Branko
never had to come to Father Man's hut all night long." "I know," I
say. "I worry about him, too." Cyran comes in about then,
looking a little better than the last I saw hir, scrubbed up and fresh, without
makeup or jewelry. E walks straight to
the bed of a little boy with the kind of big yet slanted eyes that make some
Mountainfolk children look like elves, and the same curly, black hair as the
devil himself--the one I’d treated for a beating that he’d gotten on some spy
mission. Cyran bends over my
patient. “How you feeling,
Shermio?” The boy moans and pulls a
pillow over his head. Cyran yanks the
mat out from under him while I gasp, and e says, “Don’t give me that
nonsense--I’m not talking about your hangover.”
E straightens while the boy sits up and glares at hir. “I saw you sneak out last night to party with
the best of ‘em, and your bruises look pretty faded back to me.” E turns to us and asks, “What do you think,
Medics? Any internal injuries or unknit
bones that I should know about?” “He’s past all that,” I
say, “But one more day of rest will do him good.” “I haven’t got another
day,” Cyran tells us. “I need
intelligence on troop movements now.” I
overhear hir mutter, very faintly, “My own as well as the enemy’s,” but I don’t
actually see hir lips move.
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