The Apprentices (9 page)

Now Benjamin’s father wouldn’t leave, and they were stuck in a place that seemed hotter, more humid, and more murderous every day. The Pharmacopoeia, the priceless leather-bound book stuffed with medical and magical secrets that their ancestors had passed down so carefully, was wrapped in oilcloth in his father’s backpack. The oilcloth was a feeble barrier against mildew, paper-eating insects, bullets, and grenades. It was no way to protect a seven-hundred-year legacy.

The sound of gunfire was becoming less frequent. Benjamin was hungry. “This war isn’t going to end,” he said.

“So we should let these men die?”

“No! But we should—I don’t know. Go back to thinking about the bigger picture.”
And eating real food,
he thought. Benjamin was sixteen and would have been hungry a lot even if they were back in England, but here there was a gnawing emptiness in his stomach that wouldn’t go away. The rice balls he carried, wrapped in a waxy leaf in his pocket, didn’t help.

“We aren’t very good at the bigger picture, you may have noticed,” his father said. “Medicine is the great aim, the true aim. Paracelsus said it four hundred years ago. I only lost sight of it for a time.”

Benjamin wanted to point out that Paracelsus didn’t know about atomic weapons, but he didn’t want to torture his father. After the war, in which Benjamin’s mother had been killed, his father had become alarmed by the world-destroying possibilities of the atomic bomb, and started working on an antidote. In Nova Zembla, they had succeeded, containing a blooming mushroom cloud and shrinking it back to nothing, while the Quintessence scrubbed the radiation from the air. But they had been lucky there: They knew the test was coming, and they could get close to the bomb at the right moment. The great hope was that they could improve their methods, and neutralize a bomb
after
it had been dropped in combat. But now they couldn’t even keep ahead of the escalating nuclear tests.

They had been late for two tests by the British in western Australia, and unable to get close to an American hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Atoll in March. An unlucky Japanese fishing boat
had
gotten close, though. The boat, the
Lucky Dragon
No. 5,
was forty miles away from the atoll when the wind shifted, covering the fishermen with ash. They had stopped to bring in their fishing gear before fleeing the strange powdery mist. By the time they got to shore, the fishermen had burns and blisters on their skin. Their irradiated tuna went to market, to be sold and eaten. Benjamin’s father had followed the
Lucky Dragon
’s story with a tormented interest.

Then, in early September, the Soviets tested an atomic bomb in the Ural Mountains, in Russia. Benjamin’s father hadn’t even known that one was coming, and he cursed himself for his blindness. Three weeks later, the Japanese radioman of the
Lucky Dragon
died at the age of forty. He said, “I pray that I am the last victim of an atomic or hydrogen bomb.”

After the Soviet test and the radioman’s death, something happened to Benjamin’s father. He became obsessed with their failure. He developed a tic, a muscle near his left eye that twitched so violently sometimes that Benjamin could see it. He had never been convinced by “deterrence,” the idea that the great powers would keep each other from using nuclear weapons just by possessing them. But he
had
been convinced that a few idealistic scientists—and a teenage boy—could stop the great powers from having them.
That
was the fallacy, as far as Benjamin was concerned. They were so few, and so isolated. They had no resources beyond their own strange and secret abilities. How could they follow the intelligence traffic of so many different countries, and cover so much ground,
and
stay hidden? Of course they had failed! Staying here and giving up wasn’t the answer.

Benjamin looked at his hands, which were dirty, and he wiped them down with alcohol from his bag. There would be casualties to deal with soon, and he would need clean hands. He thought of Janie, and wondered if she’d gotten his letter yet, with the little glassine envelope.

“The firing’s dying down,” his father said. “It won’t be long.”

Benjamin listened. There was a distant pop or two of gunfire, and the sound of men moaning, some of them surely dying. The Vietminh had retreated. They would return, of course. They had endless reinforcements and infusions of weapons from the Chinese. But for now they were gone.

“Let’s go,” his father said.

They crept out of their shelter and moved among the bodies. Benjamin had become good at triage, at knowing which men needed attention immediately, which could wait a little longer, and which were beyond help. He had learned useful first aid. He knelt beside a boy no older than he was, who was bleeding from an arterial leg wound, and he tied the boy’s handkerchief around his thigh to stop the pumping flow of blood. Then he cut open the cotton pant leg to expose the wound and reached in with a pair of tweezers to remove the bullet, wincing at the pain he was causing. The boy screamed. They needed a fast-acting anesthetic—Benjamin had to remind his father about that.

Tossing aside the bullet, he daubed a pasty blue salve onto the wound. It was his father’s latest concoction. Under the salve, the ragged edges of the wound re-knit themselves: Each torn piece of muscle and skin and artery wall sought
the place it had been attached before. His father had mixed in something that made it sterilizing, so it devoured any bacteria that tried to colonize the wound. He had used it on Benjamin’s scalp on the night of the ants.

Benjamin experimentally loosened the handkerchief on the boy’s thigh, and the bleeding didn’t start up again. The skin still had color in it, so he wasn’t
out
of blood—which happened sometimes. Benjamin realized he’d been holding his breath, and let it go. The boy’s face, distorted by pain, relaxed slightly. Benjamin wrapped the leg in the clean cotton gauze from his satchel and fashioned a crutch out of a fallen tree limb. He cut a notch in one end of a branch with his knife and set a short crossbar at the top, to go under the boy’s arm, then wrapped twine from a roll in his pocket around the crossbar to secure it.

Benjamin knew some of the local dialect, thanks to a rare mushroom his father had found in China. Small, brown, and nonpoisonous, it stimulated the part of the brain that acquires language. Chewing a small dried piece of the mushroom dramatically increased the speed at which they had learned the villagers’ language. It gave them a heightened linguistic focus.

Benjamin asked if his patient could walk. The boy nodded, standing with the aid of the crutch, and Benjamin moved on to the next casualty. A man his father’s age had taken a bullet to the temple. His family would bury him before the animals found him, if he had family.

Benjamin followed the sound of a moan to a lean man in his twenties, shot in the chest. Air was coming through his wound with a sucking sound. Benjamin cleaned the blood
away as well as he could, and applied some of the blue paste to the edges. Then he placed a square of thin, transparent plastic over the hole. He taped the square at the top and the two sides, leaving the bottom edge free, to create a valve. When the man breathed in, he sucked the plastic into the hole, sealing it so that air couldn’t come in that way.

Benjamin was leaning over the next casualty, another teenager, who seemed to have taken a lot of shrapnel on the right side of the body, when he heard a metallic click near his left ear.

He turned to see the man holding the gun. It was a Vietminh officer, who told him to put his hands on his head. Benjamin obeyed. He could hear his father saying irritably in English, “You
must
let me finish treating this man,” and then repeating the sentence in the local dialect, using the familiar, arrogant form of
you
that the soldiers had used. But the Vietminh clearly didn’t feel there was anything they
must
do, at least not under orders from this Englishman.

The man with the gun gave Benjamin a shove in the back. With a regretful glance, Benjamin left the kid with the shrapnel bleeding on the ground.

J
in Lo wandered the streets of her city. It was early morning, on a hazy gray day. An old man with white hair swept the sidewalk in front of a teashop. Had he lived here when she was a child, when the invading army came? Or had he been a soldier, away at war, seeing different horrors?

A striped cat stepped out of an alleyway and looked directly at Jin Lo. Its yellow eyes held hers until she was almost upon it. Then it darted away, into the shadows.

She’d had a cat of her own once, when she was eight, a black cat with a white spot on his nose and an unfortunate tendency to drool when happy. He left wet spots on her sleeve when he purred in her arms. But he was a very good hunter, and brought home mice, which he left outside the front door as offerings. When the soldiers came, he vanished. She sometimes had fantasies that he had been out hunting all this time, that he had grown huge, and could break the necks of the soldiers with one swift bite, and leave them at the door.

She pushed at Mrs. Hsu’s body and wrenched her brother free. But the boy didn’t tremble into tears, and he didn’t reach for his sister with his fat, soft arms. A single bullet had gone through both of them.
The Japanese are efficient,
her father would have said.

Jin Lo let go of her brother’s tiny hand and ran as fast as she could for the Safety Zone. Her father had told her to go to the Red Cross Hospital if she was ever alone.

She ran past more dark shapes and knew them to be the bodies of her neighbors and friends. Somewhere she heard crying, but still Jin Lo ran. Her mouth was open in a silent scream, sucking in the cold wind, which already had the taste of death in it. She would not be so foolish as to make a noise.

She reached the hospital, joined the nurses, and helped them all through the night. It was easy to tend a terrible wound if you had no heart. It didn’t make your stomach turn, or your eyes melt into tears. The nurses whispered that the American missionary, the Reverend Magee, had been out filming with a camera. He was making a record so the world would know. In the morning she reported her story to Magee himself, and she didn’t cry.

Sometimes, when she told the story later, it was she who had crawled out from under the body of Mrs. Hsu, unhurt, as she had hoped her brother would do. It was not so much that she was ashamed of hiding in the trunk. She knew that she had only been an eight-year-old girl, and she would have died
at her family’s side if she had tried to protect them. It would have been a kind of loyalty, but a futile kind. The reason she changed the story was that it made it a
story,
one she had control over, even as the heart of it stayed true. Her family had been killed, and she had survived. It was intolerable. But less so if she could change it, alter it, and move the details around.

Now that she had returned to her city, her feet took her to the street where she had grown up. She had not seen the place since she ran away to the Red Cross Hospital. Her feet moved more slowly. Many of the houses looked lived in, cared for, with small gardens in front, though there were no flowers now that it was winter.