The Healer's War (35 page)

Her own aura, the bright colors, grew slowly stronger, clearer, until at last she rose. I was going to announce myself in a soft voice, but instead I sneezed.

Hue started and whirled around. A spasm of guilt passed through me for interrupting her, but her mouth twitched very slightly, more acceptance than annoyance. She was still dressed in her funeral clothing, white pajamas, with streaks of mud at the knees where she had fallen on the way up the hill. Her black hair was combed and shining now, the blood, mud, and sweat washed away by the rain.

I made the little hand-steepling bow. Looking troubled, she returned it, nodding over her own hands.

"I-I just came to see how your leg was." I nodded toward the damaged thigh. Her aura was still less strong there, with flecks of black reappearing. Tissue damage, I thought. The venom was gone, but its toxins would have caused some tissue necrosis, a source of infection, possibly gangrene.

She looked down at her leg, her eyes clouding with confusion. Her aura clouded and swirled again, fogging over with shock. Well, who wouldn't be in shock? She'd almost been killed, sustained a terrible injury, and lost her mother and her baby all in the same day.

I nodded toward her shrine and said as gently as I could, "Sin loi," and she steepled her hands and bowed her head again. I wasn'tn sure the

"I'm sorry" I knew was the proper one to use, but she seemed to accept it in the spirit offered.

The light of the oil lamp glinted off her dark eyes.

I wanted to do something, to say something, that would let her know that I understood at least partially, that I sympathized. I dug into my pockets and found the crumpled package containing the last three peanut M&M's. It seemed as silly as the time I'd put my costume jewelry earrings in the collection plate at church because in a movie I'd seen a deposed duchess give the church her diamond ones since God had kept her husband alive. But I couldn't think of any other way to tell her.

"In my country, when someone dies, people bring food to the family.

Please accept this candy as a symbol of my respect for your mother and for your grief," I said formally.

She looked down at the crumpled package and I expected her to open her hand and let it fall.

Instead, she slit the package as delicately as if it were an elaborately wrapped gift, extracted the three M&M's, an orange, a green, and a yellow, and set them in a triangle on her mother's shrine.

Then she dipped her head over her hands again and turned away from me, confusion whirling around her in a Joseph's coat of clashing emotions. I had to leave it at that, having done the best I could to make friends.

Outside, the wind had risen, carrying with it the acrid scent of smoke, drifting on the ozone freshness of the storm, overpowering the heavy blossom-from-decay fragrance of the jungle, the faint stench of the sewage trenches, and the mingling of incense and snake stew. It was hard to tell now what was war and what was storm. The rumbling and the flashing in the eastern sky could have been either. Rain splatted across the thatches on roofs, dinged on tiles, plopped into mud, and rattled the leaves, creating an ungodly din. The tops of the trees bobbed from side to side, bowing like an obsequious butler in some old movie. The palm-type trees bent easily, giving under the storm until they arched to the ground. The little ditches outside the houses were rapidly becoming substantial moats. Earthenware jars and plastic jerricans were set out to catch rain. People scuttled about like land crabs, spring-green anticipation mingling with the fear I'd seen earlier.

At home during such a storm the dogs would be barking, the cows stupidly heading for trees under which to get struck by lightning, and the cats curled up watching the windows, congratulating themselves on having the sense not to be outdoors. I wondered suddenly where the animals were here. With the notable exception of the snake and Hoe's puppy, I hadn't seen any animals, not so much as a chicken, much less a water buffalo.

Where could they all be? I was never a genius in 4-H, but I knew enough about farming to know that not everything went to market all at once.

My GI patients told me that sometimes, to add to a body count or avoid shooting people, they shot animals, but that was mostly when they were on search-and-destroy-type operations. This village did not look as if it had been searched or destroyed. There were no burned marks on the earth, though I supposed the fast-growing greenery would have covered them up fairly quickly; it seemed that if the ammals had been destroyed long enough ago for traces of other damage to be erased, the villagers would have managed to replace at least a few of the beasts.

My feet, legs, and hips ached from slogging around in the mud.

Everything else was stiffening up too. Snake wrestling used muscles that I had somehow missed noticing in anatomy class.

I popped a couple of Midols without water, since I had no idea what was safe water and what wasn't, and didn't feel like going through the charades it would take to ask anybody, and lay back on the mat.

Sometime in the middle of the night a rocket whistled overhead and woke me. Ahn was not on the next mat, and our hostess, Truong, was missing too. White, orange, and red flashes popped up before my eyes as I glanced toward the door. The war was getting closer. Well, if it was going to kill me, I preferred that it land on top of me. I was too worn out to be curious about the whereabouts of anybody else. I rolled over on my stomach and pillowed my head on my arms, my eyes in the crook of my elbow so the lights wouldn't wake me, and slept again.

woke up when they laid a bleeding man next to me. He miscreamed when they dropped him, and that's actually what woke me. I rolled over, looked at him, and looked up at Truong, who was heading back out the door. "What the . . . ?" I mumbled. She gave me an apologetic glance but continued on her way. In another moment an old woman with a rag tourniquet around her upper arm and a bleeding stump where her lower arm should be was dragged in beside him, followed by another young man with several bloody holcs in him.

That was all they seemed able to fit for the time being, so I got up on all fours to see what I could do, since I seemed to be in charge of triage and emergency room here.

Waking exhausted from nightmares to a strange room filling with mangled bodies, I had trouble focusing. What was I expected to do with these people? There was no soap, no clean water, not even an emesis basin; certainly no pain medication, no way to do surgery even if I knew what to do. Maybe this wasn't the emergency room after all.

Maybe it was the morgue.

The glow of the corpses had been brighter than the auras of these people, but the man next to me began to moan and call out what sounded like a name. A pitiful little strip of rose beamed amid the rest of his aura, which looked less like a spirit's glow and more like a personal fog.

I pulled my bandage scissors from my ditty bag and cut off his shirt, though I already knew where his wound must be because the abdominal area was so bloody. He was partially eviscerated, his intes tines perforated, mashed together, worms crawling in and out of them.

Now I needed the emesis basin. Had there been a surgeon, he might have been one of the mid-level patients for triage-the ones who are salvageable but take a little longer. Without a surgeon and proper equipment, he was a dead man. I crawled over him to reach the old lady.

She sat rocking back and forth, holding her stump and moaning, "Oi, oi, oi, oi," over and over. Her wound was not as bad as the man's, though the blood loss and shock were a bit of a problem. Here there was no poison to herd out, no infection to rinse from her system. I was thinking that before I could start experimenting with the amulet, I really needed to get some clean bandages. That was when Hoa showed up with her shirttail full of gauze. Behind her came the girl who had had her little sister on her hip earlier that day. She was carrying the basin, the one that had last seen duty as a funeral noisemaker, once more filled with water. Not hot water, but water. Whoever was playing hospital administrator was doing a pretty good job. Hoa threw the bandages at me and ran away. I took the water from the other child but followed her out the door. Along the water-filled ditch, lying directly on the mud, were a half-dozen other injured people. I didn't even look at them. I saw Ahn with the old man and called to him.

He looked scared, and a little reluctant, but old Huang saw me waving for the boy and scalled him toward me. Ahn leaned on a new crutch made of a single long tree branch, the stick I had seen Huang carving earlier. It reminded me of a wizard's staff.

"Babysan, I need help here. Hot water, rags."

He leaned close in toward me, his face looming large for a moment.

"Mamasan, these people are-"

"Babysan, I don't care. Just get me the stuff, okay? Ask Huang. Ask Truong. I don't care. I'm too tired to argue. I don't know where anything is and I don't have anything to work with and I wish everybody would leave me the hell alone and-" I realized my voice was rising shrilly and I felt close to tears. "Oh shit, just tell them," I said, and ducked back inside to try the amulet on the patients.

The amulet's power let me see right where the wounds were, in case the shrapnel and the burns and the bullets weren't graphic enough, but though I tried as hard as I could to herd the blood back into the arteries, to mend the flesh, not a damned thing happened.

I was feeling really rational. I took the amulet out of my shirt and shook it, rubbed it off in case the accumulated grime was getting in the way of the power, like dirt on a car's headlight. I couldn't see anything wrong with it, so I put my hands close to the exposed bone and muscle of the old has stump and tried to think about healing. I closed my eyes and -almost fell asleep then, imagining I was dreaming the carnage around me, the weird shadows of scurrying Vietnamese like flickering demons outside the hut.

Voices exclaimed from the doorway and a wet, chilled body squeezed in between the casualties, beside me. Ahn patted me on the shoulder as if I were the child and started chattering so fast that I knew I must look and sound like hell, he sounded so worried. "Mamasan, mamasan, no cry, mamasan. Mamasan, Truong say, so sorry put these miserable people next to numbah one bac si. She say, you touch Hue, Hue no die. You touch Ahn, Ahn no die. When hurt people come, she say, lay them next to Co Mao. They touch Co Mao, they get bettah pretty quick. No have to clean wounds, mamasan, no have to wrap. Just touch."

I held up my hand and it was then I noticed, without immediately realizing what it meant, that there were no broad bands of color radiating from it, just thin wisps of muddy gray with an infrequent scrap of winy-pink crawling away from me like an infection creeping up a vein. I sat and stared stupidly at the hand while my patients continued to bleed to death, to moan and shriek with pain.

Ahn grabbed my hand and forced it toward the woman's stump. "Look, mamasan, see, touch, like this," and he shoved with his own hand around my wrist till my fingers brushed the wound and the old woman screamed. I grabbed the amulet with my free hand and turned on him with all the ferocity of exhaustion. "It's not me, dammit. I'm not magic. I can't heal them. It's this damned thing and it's on the fucking blink."

Ahn reached up to touch it. Truong, whom I hadn't noticed in the doorway, leaned over us, watching, her hand on Ahn's shoulder. The old lady sighed. I looked down at her, thinking the sigh was her last breath.

But the first thing I saw was a soft gray-pink ring surrounding her. The next thing I saw was that it was coming from Ahn's hand and mine. Where he touched the amulet and my fingers, the green of his aura turned to mauve-pink as it blended with mine, and where my fingers touched her, the wound was closing, dirt and drainage pouring bloodlessly out as the skin crept across the bone and nerve endings. Her breathing steadied. I felt as if I'd just discovered penicillin.

Truong had been holding a lamp and now darkness flooded the room as she backed off with a hissing intake of breath. She didn't think I'd just discovered penicillin. She thought I'd just turned into a ghost.

But my exhaustion had turned to a sort of high and I grabbed her and pulled her back to us. "Ahn, it isn't just this," I said. "And it isn't just me. It's you and Truong too. And the patient. Come on, both of you, maybe we can save this man over here."

But Truong fled, her voice rising in a harsh singsong of superstitious fear.

Abruptly the doorway filled with light again and Hue and Huang stood there, with Truong behind them, pointing to the old woman and walling.

Well, it had been a long day for Truong as well, and she'd already adapted to a lot of strange things. I realized that at the time, too, with a detached patience in my mind that had nothing to do with the way I was able to act.

"Oh, shut the hell up and get lost if you can't make yourself useful," I growled. "Come on, babysan, just like before, only this time try it with one hand on mine and one on the amulet.........

He tried, but the last effort had taken something out of him and his aura had shrunk and faded, the skin of his little face pulled tighter across his cheekbones. Hue stepped forward, protectively, and grabbed his shoulder to pull him away. Our mutual aura at once intensified. I held out my spare hand to her. Her aura was shot with gray-violet too, slightly weaker than either of ours, but underlying it was that clear strong yellow which spoke of high intelligence unintimidated by the appearance of magic, and a courageous, idealistic blue. She took my hand and the two of us touched the patient while my free hand held the amulet. My own aura brightened and bled into that of the man with the belly wound. When we started, the only bright aura around him was surrounding his intestinal worms. As we worked, his own aura throbbed into visibility, if not vitality, the blood stopped pumping out of him, the gut began knitting together, and the worms vacated the premises.

Ahn almost fell into the poor man before we moved on to the next patient. The job really was too draining for a young boy who had all but starved for three days.