The Third Bear (42 page)

I suppose that is one reason I went to medical school - because my parents did not like Stinker. Does youth need a better excuse?

As a teenager, I became contemptuous of the kind, decent folk who had raised me. I contracted a kind of headstrong cabin fever, too, for we were on the outskirts of the city. I hated the enclosing walls of the cottage. I hated my father's boat. I even hated their happiness with each other, for it seemed designed to keep me out. When I came back from my studies at the tiny school created for the children of fishermen and sailors, the smell of preservatives became the smell of something small and unambitious. Even though poor, the parents of my schoolmates often went on long journeys into the world, had adventures beyond my ken. A few even worked for the old men who ran the medical school and the faltering mages' college. I found that their stories made me more and more restless.

When the time came, I applied to the medical school. They accepted me, much to the delight of my parents, who still did not understand my motivation. I would have to work for my tuition, my books, but that seemed a small price.

I remember a sense of relief at having escaped a trap. It is a feeling I do not understand now, as if my younger self and my adult self were two entirely different people. But back then I could think only of the fact that I would be in the city's center, in the center of civilization. I would matter to more than just some farmers, cooks, fisherfolk, and the like. I would be saving lives from death, not just preserving dead things from decay.

The day I left, my father took me aside and said, "Don't become something separate from the work you do." The advice irritated me. It made no sense. But the truth is I didn't know what he meant at the time.

His parting hug and her kiss, though, were what sustained me during my first year of medical school, even if I would never have admitted it at the time.

The brittle-boned old man stands at the water's edge and stares out to sea. I wonder what he's looking at, so distant. The sargassum's right in front of him, just yards from the shore.

That's where I stare, where I search.

As a medical student, I lost myself in the work and its culture, which mainly meant sitting in the taverns boasting. I had picked up not just a roommate but a friend in Lucius, the son of a wealthy city official. We roamed the taverns for booze and women, accompanied by his friends. I didn't have much money, but I had a quick tongue and was good at cards.

Many long nights those first two years we spent daydreaming about the cures we would find, the diseases we would bring to ground and eradicate, the herbs and mixes that would restore vitality or potency. We would speak knowingly about matters of demonic anatomy and supposed resurrection, even though as far as anyone knew, none of it was true. Anymore.

Lucius: They had golems in the old days, didn't they? Surgeons must have made them. Sorcerers wouldn't know a gall bladder from a spoiled wineskin.

Me: Progress has been made. It should be possible to make a person from some twine, an apple, a bottle of wine, and some catgut.

Peter (Lucius' friend): A drunk person, maybe.

Lucius: You are a drunk person. Are you a golem?

Me: He's no golem, he's just resurrected. Do you remember when he began showing up? Right after we left the cadaver room.

Lucius: Why, I think you're right. Peter, are you a dead man?

Peter: Not to my knowledge. Unless you expect me to pay for all this.

Lucius: Why can'tyou bea resurrected woman?Ihave enough dead malefriends.

During the days - oh marvel of youth! - we conquered our hangovers with supernatural ease and spent equal time in the cadaver room cutting up corpses and in classes learning about anatomy and the perilous weakness of the human body. Our myriad and ancient and invariably male instructors pontificated and sputtered and pointed their fingers and sometimes even donned the garb and grabbed the knife, but nothing impressed as much as naked flesh unfolding to show its contents.

And then there was the library. The medical school had been built around the library, which had been there for almost a thousand years before the school, originally as part of the mages' college. It was common knowledge, which is to say unsubstantiated rumor, that when the library had been built thaumaturgy had been more than just little pulses and glimpses of the fabric underlying the world. There had been true magic, wielded by a chosen few, and no one had need of a surgeon. But none of us really knew. Civilization had collapsed and rebuilt itself thrice in that span. All we had were scraps of history and old leather-bound books housed in cold, nearly airless rooms to guide us.

Lucius: If we were real surgeons, we could resurrect someone. With just a little bit of magic. Medical know-how. Magic. Magic fingers.

Me: And preservations.

Richard (another of Lucius' friends): Preservations?

Lucius: He comes from a little cottage on the -

Me: Its nothing. A joke. A thing to keep fetuses from spoiling until we've had a look at them.

Peter: What would we do with a resurrected person?

Lucius: Why, we'd put him up for the city council. A dead person ought to have more wisdom than a living one.

Me. We could maybe skip a year or two of school if we brought a dead person back.

Richard.- Do you think they'd like it? Being alive again?

Lucius: They wouldn't really have a choice, would they?

Do you know what arrogance is? Arrogance is thinking you can improve on a thousand years of history. Arrogance is trying to do it to get the best of the parents who always loved you.

Me: There're books in the library, you know.

Lucius: Quick! Give the man another drink. He's fading. Books in a library. Never heard ofsuch a thing.

Me: No, I mean -

Lucius: Next you'll be telling us there are corpses in the cadaver room and -

Richard: Let him speak, Lucius. He looks serious.

Me: I mean books on resurrection.

Lucius: Do tell...

For a project on prolonged exposure to quicksilver and aether, I had been allowed access to the oldest parts of the library - places where you did not know whether the footprints in the dust revealed by the light of your shaking lantern were a year or five hundred years old. Here, knowledge hid in the dark, and you were lucky to find a little bit of it. I was breathing air breathed hundreds, possibly thousands, of years before by people much wiser than me.

In a grimy alcove half-choked with old spider webs, I found books on the ultimate in preservation: reanimation of dead matter. Arcane signs and symbols, hastily written down in my notebook.

No one had been to this alcove for centuries, but they had been there. As I found my halting way out, I noticed the faint outline of boot prints beneath the dust layers. Someone had paced before that shelf, deliberating, and I would never know their name or what they were doing there, or why they stayed so long.

Lucius: You don't have the balls.

Me: The balls? I can steal the balls from the cadaver room.

Richard: He can have as many balls as he wants!

Peter: We all can!

Lucius: Quietly, quietly, gents. This is serious business. We're planning on a grandiose level. We're asking to be placed on the pedestal with the greats.

Me: It's not that glorious. It's been done before, according to the book.

Lucius: Yes, but not for hundreds of years.

Peter: Seriously, you wonder why not.

Richard: I wonder why my beer mug's empty.

Peter: Barbarian.

Richard.- Cretin.

Me: It seems easy enough. It seems as if it is possible.