The Healer's War (37 page)

Hue ignored him, appealing instead to the older man.

He shook his head and turned away from her. The younger man kicked her on the site of her injury and planted his foot on her abdomen, setting the bayonet blade against her face. Hoa ran shouting from among the villagers, toward my hiding place.

Staying alive around here appeared to be a popularity contest and I had just lost. I flipped the bush back, stood up, and started to run for it. I saw the trip wire just in time. It was stretched between the two trees, just beyond the dog hole.

If I had been thinking straight, I could have managed to run smack into it. But then it might not have killed me. It could have been a pungi stick trap, which would merely maim or poison me, not a grenade. My reaction time was way too slow, and by the time I made the decision and avoided it, someone was twisting my arms up behind my back so hard I heard the joints pop. The pain shot like a branding iron through the arms, into my heart, down my gut, and straight to my bladder and bowels.

A knife blade twirled itself before my eyes.

Then all at once a strident voice began talking in rapid Vietnamese and one of the younger men, probably no more than a teenager, stepped in front of me while talking fast to my captor. The young man looked vaguely familiar, and though he spoke in Vietnamese I understood the gist of his speech, which would have translated to something like,

"Colonel Dinh, perhaps I misunderstand the situation, but if I may venture a suggestion, I with my own eyes and all these people saw this womanxcuse me, sir, this foreign whore"-he spit at me, for effect-"perform magic that healed last night's casualties. Perhaps the Colonel would find it less embarrassing to interrogate her elsewhere."

Hearing him, understanding him, I knew him. He was one of the men who had helped me into the hut the night before, one of the strangers who had touched the amulet, and he was trying to save me. His aura was cyanotic with fear of being thought a traitor, but it also bore a blue brighter than that of his superior, blue that spoke of a part of his spirit that had been revived. When he touched the amulet, when he helped heal his comrade, he had healed a little, too. Furthermore, he was still a little linked to me, even though time had passed and contact was broken. He carefully avoided looking at me.

The colonel strode in front of me, glared at me, nodded abruptly, and I was manhandled back to the village. The little creep who held my arms had to bend me over double to keep my wrists between my shoulder blades, because he wasn't tall enough to reach my shoulder blades easily when I stood up straight. So I stumbled ahead of him to where Hue sat painfully erect, watching our progress with an aura cloaked in battleship-gray and her eyes desperately hard. Something gleamed in the mud: her gold tooth.

The others had disappeared-including Ahn. The villagers were still protecting him, which I took to mean that the young soldier who had spoken to the colonel was right. The village was too frightened of the VC to try to save me, but the colonel would be pushing his luck to

. ,, streat me here. Damn. William knew I was here and there was a slim chance he might have found other men, that I might still be rescued, although I wasn't sure that by the time that happened I would be in any shape to know the difference.

While I was thinking this over, surrounded by small people who were smirking at me, poking, groping, and otherwise trying to make me Jump so that my arms would hurt even worse, the colonel stooped and extended a hand to Hue. He said something gruff and disapproying to her. She looked up at him and spoke again. And again I understood what she was saying without translation. The words of my captors, except for the boy who had talked to the colonel, were still a blessed mystery to me.

Obviously, a detached part of me decided, the amulet formed a link between those who touched it, one that conferred understanding-I supposed it must simply get clearer and more literal with practice, or length and intensity of contact. Or perhaps I simply underltood more because of the urgency of my need to know what was being said.

Hue's face was swollen, bleeding, and covered with filth, but she said in the calm, soft voice appropriate to a well-bred Vietnamese girl, "I have done nothing incorrect, Father. You are mistaken about the woman.

She is not really an American. She's a magician who has made herself look like an American, to test us, if you ask me. She saved my miserable life. Would you have me dishonor our ancestors by betraying her?"

The colonel stood, and just for a moment the brilliant yellow of his aura flickered with indecision; then he marched us out of the village.

I couldn't keep up. The VC trotted through places my body wouldn't fit, and the branches tore at me. I kept closing my eyes to try to protect them, because bent over as I was, my face was even with the backlashing brush that hit me when the others passed. Small hard bodies crowded me on all sides, shoving so that I was afraid of being trampled. Finally I fell.

I fell forward, face down into the mud, without being able to use my hands to break my fall. My teeth bit into my lips and cheeks and my nose started bleeding. The little bastard who had been holding on to me fell onto my back and I rolled over angrily and dumped him. "Let me alone, dammit," I squalled. "I haven't done anything to you." My feelings were hurt as badly as they had been in my dream when I found out I was in hell. And even while I was bellowing, I realized how stupid it all was. I was going to get killed in an undoubtedly nasty and painful fashion by people I had absolutely no quarrel with. How many of their relatives had been killed the same way? How many of my patients had survived the same sort of thing? It was all so dumb. I screamed something to that effect.

The young soldier who had tried to help me that morning knelt beside me, placatingly, but the colonel backhanded me the way he had done his daughter. I saw the blow coming and ducked away from it. That was a mistake. He knocked the young soldier out of the way and reached for me with both hands. His aura didn't change, except for a few sparks of red, and I knew that he didn't really care about me personally one way or the other, but was angry that Hue had taken my side against him. And though no one else could see, I knew from the foggy gray encompassing his aura that he was mourning his wife, the woman who was killed by the snake. His movements were precise and mechanical as he cut his way through a swamp of shock and loss.

He grabbed my hair first, but it was short and slick with mud and rain, so he switched his grip to the theng that held the amulet around my neck and jerked on it. The theng cut across my windpipe and I started to cough, then didn't have the breath to cough, gagged, and felt my face swell with unoxygenated blood. My lungs pumped like crazy, my whole chest burning, and water streamed from my eyes and nose. My ears rang and everything started to cloud over.

And that detached part of me thought: Oh boy, the press is going to love this one-Kitty McCulley, girl martyr. I wonder how many extra innocent people are going to get wasted as payback for me? The thought did not fill me with a savage thrill of vengeance. It just made me sadder and angrier and more frustrated with the whole miserable mess. I was going to die poorly and stupidly and senselessly. Shit.

Deadness tried to enter through the amulet, but my own fear and anger cut through it like a red-hot chain saw.

Oxygen flooded back into my lungs like water poured over a burn as the theng was released. My head kept swimming for several moments, but no blow, no questions followed. The little bastard with the hot-lava aura griped in a high-pitched voice and was very plainly saying something like "Let me at 'er, let me at 'er," but nobody was touching me anymore, and I was allowed to bury my face in my hands and gasp until my heartbeat and respirations resumed something like normal function.

When I finally looked up, the coloel was half a step from me, staring at me. He looked as shaken as I felt. When I looked at him, he looked away. Lava-aura made a disgusted noise in his throat and growled something at the colonel, which earned him a glower. The colonel did bear a family resemblance to Hue, especially in his truculent expression and the intelligence in his eyes. But he was baking on top, and his sharp cheekbones and chin triangulated to give him a closer resemblance to the snake that had killed his wife.

He seemed to come to a decision and, elbowing aside both lavaaura and my ally, squatted down before me and spoke clearly, distinctly, and loudly-in Vietnamese. My ally protested that I didn't know Vietnamese, so the colonel raised his voice and spoke louder. But it wasn't necessary. While his individual words didn't make sense to me, I still was able to catch his drift. He looked into my eyes, pointedly away from the amulet.

"They say you have healing hands, woman. I should cut those hands off to keep my people from falling under your spell. But my ignorant daughter says you mean no harm, that you use this power to help our people-that you are a compassionate person. If that is so, you have other power to help us. You come up North with us, you talk to your American press, you tell them that your men rape our women, murder them, but we treat you with respect. You tell them how wrong this war is. You say to them that your healing hands can make no difference when for every person you save, thousands die. You do this, woman, and earn your life. Do not think to trick us. Up North they have good speakers of English."

He kept looking directly into my eyes when he spoke, and I knew that he knew I understood what he was saying. I nodded. I wasn't lying. I was so relieved I felt faint with it. Right then I wanted to please him more than I wanted to please my own father, more than I wanted to please Duncan, more than I had ever wanted to please anyone. He could have me tortured to death or he could protect me, and he had chosen to protect me, for the time being. Once we got "up North," wherever that was, it might be another story, but for now I was going to live. I dipped my head and nodded, and snuck a glance at his face. He looked as relieved as I felt, and there was something else in his face too, something that he tried to conceal from everyone-something that embarrassed and intrigued him at the same time. Without knowing anything of my background, family, language, or customs, he now knew me as well as he knew Hue. Better, maybe. And if he killed me, he would know exactly who and what he was killing. Not that he hadn't killed many times before, women, old people, children. But he had steeled himself not to hear those people, to think of them as something besides people, as something he had no responsibility toward, no obligation to understand.

He would not be able to bullshit himself about me. Holding on to that amulet, strangling me, he'd inadvertently become closer than my mother, closer than a lover, and he couldn't weasel out of it without damaging himself even more than he had already been damaged. While he held the charm, what I was had poured toward him and, taken by surprise, he had been unprepared to reject it. Only now, as he began to wrestle with his reaction to the amulet and to me, could I understand his share in the link.

Gruffly he ordered me to stand, but when my former guard tried to manhandle me again, he berated him, told him to tie my hands in front of me and lead me, what did he think he was doing, hobbling me that way so that I slowed us down? He could get his jollies feeling me up when they weren't in such a hurry.

couldn't keep up. My captors breezed through the jungle as if it iwere a city park and they were the street gang in charge. They ate a handful of rice once a day and took a drink maybe twice. I was woozy with hunger and thirst before we'd been traveling an hour. Colonel Dinh thinned his lips irritably but had my other friend give me a drink of yellowed water and a salt tablet and off we went again.

The first night we slept in a tunnel. I've heard there were great complexes of them, but the one we were in was more like an underground bunker. The passage was narrow, obviously not made for an American girl's hips. The other men preceded us, with my village ally going just before me, and the colonel just after.

Oddly, now that I knew I was in no immediate danger from the colonel, I felt less frightened than I had at any time since I'd come to the jungle. I didn't have to worry about booby traps or mines. These were the guys who set them. I didn't have to worry about enemy capture. That had already happened. I had nothing to worry about except what might happen when we got where we were going, which was still a long way off, and whether or not an air strike might accidentally hit us. So with my friend from the village on one side of me and the colonel on the other, and the passage too small for any moving around, I slept better than I had since I'd left the 83rd. My captors could sleep soundly too. The colonel was watching the entrance. If any Americans stumbled across the tunnel, the colonel could shove me forward as a shield.

My eyes opened on darkness, and I squeezed them shut again. I remembered that something terrible had happened, something irrevocable, but for a moment I couldn't remember what it was and I didn't want to. I smelled the earth, rich and musky, and something dead. I stretched out my hand and touched flesh and hair, withdrew the hand quickly. My heart pounded with panic. Was I dead? Buried? Was this another corpse in some mass grave? Slowly I forced myself to calm down, felt the area around me. Someone groaned. Someone else's sandals were in my back. I opened my eyes. Along the tunnel passage lay the sleeping bodies of my captors, cloaked in their various-colored auras, looking for all the world like the ghosts of Easter eggs lining some subterranean nest. I tried to sit up and bumped my head on something hard. A restraining hand pushed me back down. The sandals dug into my back as the colonel sat up. A pencil-thin shaft of light fell across my eyes, then a volleyball-sized shaft, as the colonel lifted the cover away from the tunnel entrance. He climbed out and extended his hand. I climbed out after him.

He sat on a log and lit a cigarette, offered me one. I took it. He sat staring into space for a long time. He was wearing a pistol. I could have taken it during the night, I supposed, but I'm not sure what I would have done after that. "Babe in the woods" didn't even begin to describe my degree of total helplessness and inaptitude.