The Fifth Sacred Thing (39 page)

“Maybe I can help.”

“Sure hope so.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Madrone said. “To help any way I can.”

“What about us?” Rhea said, touching Madrone’s elbow and looking into her eyes. “Can you help us?”

It cost her to ask that, Madrone thought. She is a woman of great pride. She answered, pitching her voice low and gentle.

“I’m sorry, Rhea. I can keep you alive, but I can’t regrow lost limbs or change your face. I’m a healer, not a miracle worker.”

“Your friend worked a few, from what I hear.”

“Bird?” Madrone smiled, patting Rhea’s hand. “Ah, but you see, he’s a miracle worker but not a healer.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean sometimes in a life-or-death situation gifts come to us that are beyond what we can usually handle. Miracles happen. But to be a healer is to try to learn to make lesser miracles happen regularly and predictably.”

“If you can do anything near what Bird did, and do it regularly, we’ll be set,” said a young man coming up to them. He was slightly built, hardly more than a boy, with dark hair that he tossed back from his forehead as he
regarded Madrone with bright blue eyes. “So you’re the one Bird sent. I guess he found his people, then.”

“Yes, he did.” Madrone smiled. “He wanted to come back here himself, but his legs were in pretty bad shape.”

“I know. I was with him in the Pit. Name’s Littlejohn.” He stuck out his hand, and Madrone took it.

“He’s spoken of you.”

“I bet he has.”

“He said if I met you to give you his love.”

“He said that, did he?”

“Yes, that was what he said.”

Littlejohn just stood, thoughtful but expressionless. Yet somehow Madrone felt they would be friends. They were linked through Bird, who had made it back from this place to his home, in spite of everything. That was one miracle. Surely others would follow.

The room was filled with sick young men, tossing on makeshift pallets of old blankets, their breath wheezing and whistling through fluid-filled lungs. Madrone picked one at random and laid her hand on his forehead. He was flushed, feverish, murmuring to himself in his sleep.
Diosa
, there were so many of them, how could she heal them all? And really the place needed a thorough cleaning; she was starting to cough herself, from the dust. She would take the matter up with Rhea. They needed more organization, more basic nursing care. But now she needed concentration.

Slowing her own breath, she
searched
her patient’s aura. Well, there was plenty to see here, no difficulty finding causes for his condition. She moved through clouds of dandelion fluff, taking care not to breathe it in. But this was nothing unusual, just the signature of a common rhinovirus in the
ch’i
worlds. Fetid swamps of bacteria pooled in the moist crevices of his lungs. Could that really be all? A common cold run riot into pneumonia?

She shifted her perception, looking for the red glow of the bloodstream. There it was. She dove in, allowed her consciousness to swim down the arteries, taste the iron and rust of the hemoglobin. But where were the white cells?
Diosa
, this would be so much easier with a lab and a microscope. She hated having to depend completely on her own psychic vision. Still, this is why I came, she told herself, and continued on, looking now for the lymph system. Then she was wandering through a dry riverbed, littered with stones. She dug her hands into the soft soil at the bottom. Yes, there was still some moisture deep under the surface, but she could not tell if it would ever rise again.

“There’s good news and bad news,” Madrone told Isis and Rhea over supper. Rhea had made a pot of beans, and Madrone dipped chunks of bread into the
broth, eating hungrily. She felt drained but at the same time happy. Healing was exhausting, demanding, but it was what she was born to do, and she was glad to be working again. “We don’t seem to be up against anything too odd or nasty, and that’s good. Mostly common colds, flu, some intestinal parasites. But the problem is that all these guys have immune systems that are basically nonfunctional. I don’t know exactly how the boosters work, but it seems they create a dependency. Once they’re withdrawn, the system has lost the ability to stimulate itself. Maybe in time it’ll come back. Maybe it won’t.”

“What can we do?” Rhea asked.

“Steal us a boatload of antivirals?” Madrone said to Isis.

Isis shook her head. “They don’t stock them up here. Just boosters, highs, and lows. Maybe the hillboys farther south can get some, but the problem of transporting large quantities … you’ll see for yourself what it’s like when you go down there.”

Madrone shifted uneasily. Everyone seemed to expect that when she had brought the situation under control here, she would move on to join the groups in the southern mountains. Should I? she wondered. Here there is relative safety, but further on? I don’t want to go, but then again, I didn’t want to come here, and I am desperately needed. Do I have the right to back away from the struggle?

But that was not the question at hand. Right now she had to deal with the situation here. “Look, this is what I’d like to try,” she said. “First, any new deserters that haven’t gotten sick yet, I want isolated for a week or two. Keep them away from crowds, from the sickrooms. I’ll show you how to make masks that can protect them from bacteria. And there’re some questions of basic hygiene we can go into. Then maybe I can look at their immune systems, see if there’s a way to kickstart them again, or if they may revive naturally, given time.

“Next I want to see your herb gardens and take a walk out into the woods. The more we can do with herbs, the more we can save my energy, which has its limits. I can heal some of these guys, but I can’t heal thirty desperately sick men tomorrow and then heal them again the next day, and the next. And Isis, if you can get me some boosters … I don’t know how I’ll analyze them without any equipment, but I’ll think of something.”

Given direction, the Monsters made good workers, Madrone noted. Within a week, they had thoroughly cleaned the sickroom, harvested and dried the herbs Madrone pointed out, and brewed and served vats of tea. She taught them to apply compresses for fever and gave them seeds of echinacea to plant for the future. The latest group of deserters, masked and gloved and housed apart, remained relatively healthy. The days passed. New moon gave way to full moon. In the North, the streets of Old Chinatown would be filled with
people carrying home blossoming cherry branches, and in the moonlit night the silk-and-brocade dragon would wind through the streets in a great procession of drummers and dancers. What year was this in Chinese astrology, the Year of the Rat, or the Horse, or the Snake? She should know; she had lost count. But that was another world,
otro mundo
. In this world, some of the sick progressed. Some died.

Madrone walked out into the forest, where the morning sun shone down on a spreading live oak. Under it the grass was a rich green from the winter rains, and she spread a blanket and lay down where the leaves let mottled sunlight warm her in patches. The warmth would help. In her hand she held a blue pill, one of the boosters Isis had obtained for her. She was debating what to do with it.

I know what I have to do, she told herself, but she hesitated. Without a lab, without equipment, she had no way to analyze the pill. She could attempt to read its
ch’i
, to divine its molecular structure, but no psychic vision was that acute.

But if she took it herself, she could observe its effects on her own body, watch her own immune system respond to the drug.

You’ve been down this road before, girl, she told herself. How many lectures did you get on the theme that a healer should never experiment on her own body? But what else can I do?

I’m not as arrogant as I once was. I don’t believe I can necessarily overcome every assault, and my own immune system is presently working just fine, thank you. If it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it, as Johanna would say. Nevertheless, I’m going to do this, aren’t I?

She opened her water bottle, spilled a few drops as an offering, and held it up to the sun.

“¡Salud!”
she said out loud. Since the toast meant “to your health,” it seemed appropriate. Popping the pill into her mouth, she swallowed the water and lay on the ground to wait.

She dozed for about half an hour. Really, she was exhausted, so tired that since she’d begun her healing work she had declined all of Isis’ offers to spend a night aboard the boat. Finally some subtle shift in her body’s chemistry woke her. She called in her spirit helpers, shifted her breathing to the pattern that put her deep into trance, and began to observe her own bloodstream.

She swam in clear serum, salty like the ocean, and her own cells looked like fish, lively darting red fish, and white fish of various shapes and sizes, some large and stately, exuding colors and tastes that clarified the waters where they passed, some active, sharp-toothed, moving in to devour intruders.

The stream felt healthy, full of life. But something was off, abnormal; she couldn’t quite identify how or what. She turned, to make her way upstream
against the pressure of her own blood, the closed door of her own valves. This is silly, she told herself, you’re forgetting what you know about magic. Just visualize where you want to be.

The bone marrow, where white cells are born. She was there, suddenly, amid the good brown earth of a garden, a nursery. And the white cells were no longer fish but a kind of flower, which grew up from the soil on long stems, turning themselves into balloons and floating off. And now, yes, there was a difference here, a new taste, a new scent, as if someone had poured a chemical fertilizer on honest ground, and the plants were rooting and blossoming at a hurried pace.

This one dose won’t hurt me, Madrone thought, but if I were to take this drug day after day, year after year, like any chemical it would eventually exhaust the soil. And then, to remove it suddenly …

I still don’t know what it is, only vaguely what it does, and I had already guessed that much. I’m tiring now and cannot track this any further alone, without backup. I’ve learned that much, at least.