Angel-Seeker (44 page)

When, in fact, had her own monthly bleeding last occurred? Not for weeks now—not for months. She had never paid much attention to her cycles, which had always been erratic and hard to predict; she had just learned to deal with each episode as it occurred. But she was thinking furiously now. If she had not had her bleeding this month, or the last month, or the month before that—

Sweet Jovah singing like a mournful angel of death. She was carrying Obadiah's child.

T
he pregnant woman screamed again, squeezing down on Elizabeth's hand with a pressure that almost broke the bones, and then subsided into a quiet, moaning pant. Elizabeth didn't even ask; she used her free hand to toss through her satchel and dig out two more tablets of pain-reducing medicine. “Here, take these,” she said, holding the pills to the woman's mouth.

“I don't—want to—faint,” the woman gasped.

“You won't,” Elizabeth promised. “But I think you'll feel better.”

Mary glanced up from her position between the woman's legs. “Soon now,” she said.

“Is my baby going to be all right?” the woman managed, between huffs of breath.

“I think so. I see its head, that's a good sign. We just need a little more effort from you—and some patience—”

“It hurts.” The woman sighed.

“Yes,” Mary said. “Unfortunately, that's the way of it.”

And this child fighting for entrance into the world was not even angelic, Elizabeth reflected. Although Elizabeth had yet to actually witness an angel birth, she had formed a pretty fair idea of the difficulties an angel child could cause to its mother even before it was brought into the world. Just a week ago, she and Mary had been called to the bedside of Magdalena, who was suffering severe pains and terrified that her child was trying to arrive too early.

Elizabeth had never seen any angel look so desperate and pale, her skin whiter than her wings, her slender hands too shaky to hold a glass of water to her lips. Mary had commanded Elizabeth to mix a variety of herbs while the healer massaged the angel's stomach and tried to feel for the size and placement of the tiny life inside. The potion Elizabeth had eventually fed to the angel had caused Magdalena to fall into a drugged sleep—and, Mary had predicted, would halt the early labor pains as well.

“But she must take some of this medicine every four hours for the next two weeks,” Mary had told the golden-haired woman who had appeared to be the angel's private nurse. “And if the pains resume, you must call for me right away.”

The golden-haired woman had nodded. “Do you have something that will take away her nausea? Everything she eats makes her sick. But she has to eat, or the baby—” The woman gestured.

“Corvine works best for that,” Mary said regretfully. “But I don't have any.”

“Oh, yes, the Edori use corvine for stomach upsets,” the other woman replied. “I'll see if any of the clans are in town and ask if I can buy some from them.”

Which had seemed like such an odd thing to say that Elizabeth had paused in the repacking of her satchel to give the other woman a long, curious stare. She was mortal, and remarkable in looks only because of that hair, but there was something about her that rivaled the self-assured arrogance of the angels. Not a nurse after all, Elizabeth decided. A Manadavvi, perhaps. A friend of Nathan's wife, come to aid her in her time of need, and willing to take drastic measures to make sure Magdalena was cared for.

“If you find any Edori willing to sell their herbs, send them over to me,” Mary had replied. “I prefer the Edori medicines much of the time.”

The golden-haired woman had smiled. “So often,” she had said, “everything about the Edori ways is to be preferred.”

Later that same day, a courier had arrived at Mary's suites with a selection of powdered herbs in various pouches and canisters. Mary had exclaimed greedily over the new riches and carefully explained to Elizabeth which potions were to be used in which situations. In
fact, Elizabeth had already fed one of the powdered herbs to their current patient, though it wasn't clear that the medicine had had much effect. The two big white tablets, however, seemed to have tamed some of her pain, for she now lay more quietly on her bed.

“How much longer now?” the woman asked in a voice that was almost a whisper.

“Soon,” Mary said again. Elizabeth, who had now attended more than a dozen births, figured they had another hour to go.

There was a commotion outside the room and the sound of urgent voices raised, most of them male. Elizabeth knew one voice belonged to this woman's husband, but the others were unfamiliar. They all sounded angry.

A minute later, there was a knock on the bedroom door, and the husband himself came into the room, giving his wife one wretched, compassionate look. “I'm sorry,” he said, addressing the healer. “There are men outside. They say there's been an accident, and they need your help.”

“I can't possibly leave her,” Mary said sharply.

“That's what I told them. But they say a man has been severely hurt, and he could be dying.”

Mary looked over at Elizabeth, who felt her stomach do a giddy flip. “It's up to you,” Mary said. “You can bind a cut and set a bone. Do you feel up to going on your own?”

“I don't know, I—” Elizabeth stammered.

“What about my wife?” the man demanded.

“You'll just have to help me,” Mary said. “I'll tell you what to do.”

“What if I can't help this man?” Elizabeth said.

“You'll do him more good than a bunch of fool-headed men who would just stand around and watch him bleed,” Mary said roundly. “If you fail, you fail, but at least you'll have tried to save him.”

Elizabeth felt stupid and nervous, unsure of herself and clumsy. She glanced around the room as if looking for an excuse to stay, and her eyes came to rest on the face of the patient on the bed.

“Go to him,” the woman panted. “I'll be—fine. I would feel so dreadful if—someone died . . . because of me.”

Elizabeth felt her lips tighten and her stomach curl into a small
ball. She stood up. “I have to wash my hands,” she said. “Tell them I'll be right there.”

Three men had been injured at the construction site on the west edge of town, but only one of them was in severe straits. He was not only unconscious and probably suffering from a concussion as well, but he had an open wound that sliced from his neck across his chest and down to his hip, which was shattered. Elizabeth could not believe he had not already bled to death. Gazing down at him, she felt her own blood retreat in her veins, leaving her hands cold and her brain too numb to function.

“Those two over there—broken bones, that's all, we know how to set those, but Henry—you've got to do something,” said the man who had brought her down here at a run so hard she was still struggling to regain her breath. “He's going to die.”

“He might,” Elizabeth said in a small voice. “Somebody bring me a bucket of water. And somebody else set some water on to boil. I'll do what I can.”

She knelt beside him where he had been laid on a blanket that had been thrown down in the middle of a muddy street. This was her makeshift sickroom. Someone here had known enough to stanch the blood and put pressure on the wounds, but the cloth across his chest was still leaking with fresh blood. She could lather him with manna root paste to slow the bleeding and force tablets down his throat to prevent infection, but she was not sure she could sew up a wound that stretched so far and went so deep—not sure she could do it in time, not sure she could do it at all. So far the only cut she had sewed up on her own had been a small one on a little girl's finger. She didn't have a clue what to do about the shattered hipbone. She would start with the wound and hope that, by the time she was done, Mary would have arrived to finish the job.

“Somebody will have to help me,” she said in a small voice. “I need a pair of hands to peel back the cloth slowly and hold the edges of the wound together.”

It seemed like hours that Elizabeth labored over Henry's broken body, moving as painstakingly but efficiently as she could. His
breathing was ragged and uneven, and every now and then it seemed to stop for the space of a beat or two. Elizabeth had forced a mixture of painkillers and anti-infection drugs down his throat before she began working on his wound, but she was not sure he was awake enough to feel any of her ministrations anyway. He didn't grunt or cry out whenever her needle entered his skin; he didn't move or jerk away from the sting of salve along his open sore. He just continued that heavy, clumsy breathing, in, out, pause, pause, in, out, pause. . . .

Once she was past the tricky veins of the neck, Elizabeth felt more sure of herself, though the blood trickled out in sluggish, regular spurts as she worked her way across his chest. She was so cold; her fingers could not feel the oversize needle, trembled every time she tried to insert new thread through the eye. Someone brought her hot liquid and held it to her lips, since she did not want to touch anything with her bloody fingers. Someone else—or maybe the same person—brought a blanket and wrapped it around her where she knelt on the rocky dirt, looping it through her arms and tying it around her back so that she received some warmth without having the edges fall in her way. The third time she paused to rethread her needle, someone caught her hand.

“Here,” said a voice that she almost recognized. “Put these on.”

“These” were a pair of small cotton gloves, not entirely clean, from which the fingertips had been clipped away. They were too big for her, but she gratefully slipped her frozen hands inside. “Thank you,” she said, sparing a moment to glance up at her thoughtful assistant.

It was the Edori Rufus. Whom she had not seen in more than three months.

“What else can I get you?” he asked gravely. “How can I help?”

For a moment her mind was completely blank. “Something else hot to drink, thank you,” she said. “Soup, if there's any to be had. I don't want to get faint.”

“I'll be right back.”

She wanted to stare after him, wanted to call, “Wait! How have you been? I've thought about you.” But the troubled breathing of her patient called her back to her situation, and she quickly bent over his
wounded chest again. Broken ribs, too, no doubt, but there wasn't much she could do about them. She silently recited the list of imperatives that Mary had taught her on her very first week on the job:
breathing, bleeding, bones, burns.
He was breathing; she was taking care of the bleeding. He had no burns, and his bones could wait. She took another stitch.

It was close to sunset by the time Mary arrived, looking exhausted but capable. Rufus and two of his fellow workers had strung a few lanterns above Elizabeth's head so that she wouldn't have to work in darkness, though she still had to be careful to hold her head so that its shadow did not fall in her way. The cold had gotten even sharper as a wind had arisen. Now Elizabeth couldn't feel any part of her body: not her knees and ankles where she knelt on the ground, not her icy fingers, not her frozen nose.

“Let me see, let me see,” Mary said briskly, and Elizabeth was never so glad to turn responsibility over to another human being. “Hmm—yes, very good. Has he spoken? Has he thrown up?”

Elizabeth shook her head and quickly rattled off the drugs she'd administered and the steps she'd taken. “But I don't know how to set his hipbone, and I'm sure he's got some broken ribs,” she finished up.

“Well, you did an excellent job sewing up the wound,” Mary said. She had knelt beside Elizabeth on the dirt road, but now she glanced up and around. “We can't leave him outside in the middle of the street. We have to get him to a house, or at least a bed. Somewhere he can stay a good week or two. He's going to have to be immobilized.”

“We were afraid to move him,” someone said.

“Right, you did the right thing for the moment, but now he's going to have to be taken someplace safer,” Mary said. “How far is his house?”

There followed a short discussion about possible sickbeds, with the construction crew quickly deciding that their foreman's office was the closest and most logical location. “But I don't know how we can move him without killing him,” one of the men added.

“I'll get a door,” Rufus said. “It'll be flat and sturdy. We'll pull the blanket over onto that. Four of us can carry him once he's on it.”

“Is he ready to be moved?” Mary asked Elizabeth, who was setting the final stitches as close as she dared to the smashed hip.

“I've done what I can,” Elizabeth said, sitting back on her heels. She used the back of her wrist to push the hair out of her eyes. She wanted to curl up in a ball and fall asleep, right here in the middle of the road. “How's the baby?”

“Just fine,” Mary said, permitting herself a small smile. “Little girl, quite perfect. The mother is sleeping. The baby is
not
sleeping, and so her father is getting a chance to learn how to calm her.”

“I wish you'd been here,” Elizabeth said.

“It doesn't look like you needed me,” Mary said. “But the man told us three people had been hurt. Where are the others?”

Elizabeth rose tiredly to her feet. “I can look at them now, if you can take care of Henry.”

Mary nodded, all her attention back on the unconscious man. “You do that,” she said. “I'll finish up here.”