We’ve looked for you, Karen. We looked in the house, and then in the barn, and among the trees, and down on the beach and all across the island. The police came and helped us look. All our friends and neighbors came. We showed your picture everywhere. I think that everybody on Earth must have seen your picture finally.
But nobody knew where you were. The sheriff couldn’t help us. You’d vanished without a trace, he said. You’d wandered off and drowned, he thought. He couldn’t find any sign that an evil person had come into your room in the night and carried you away. So you must have drowned, he said. And after that, the sheriff didn’t help us look anymore.
Did you drown, Karenina? My little fish? I’ve watched you dive in the deep water and swim with the dolphins. You’re a sea creature like them. Did you go off with the dolphins, my girl? God knows, you’re stubborn enough to go swimming in the deep water, even after we told you not to. Is that where you are, my little mermaid? Are you in the sea? Will you ever swim home again?
Your daddy and I miss you so much. But maybe it is good, after all, that you have gone away from us. Something terrible has happened here on the island. Right after you left, people began to get sick. They began to bleed, and nobody knew how to stop the bleeding. So much blood! We watched our friends and neighbors die. God help me, my child, but a part of me is so thankful that you were not here to see everyone die.
Your daddy and I didn’t get sick. We don’t know why we lived when no one else did. We buried our neighbors, as many as we could. We tried to wash away the blood. The whole island seemed soaked in it. We did our best.
And we looked for you, Karenina, half afraid we would find you among the dead, and half afraid we would never find you at all.
We can’t stay on this island any longer, my little fish. It’s too lonely here. We’re slowly going crazy. So much blood, and everyone but us dead. Your daddy is getting the boat ready. We’re going to set sail and look for people. Is anyone alive, anywhere? We don’t know. We are going to look.
We might not be able to come home again, Karenina. But maybe you will come home, and if you do you’ll read this letter and know how hard we looked for you.
Your daddy wanted to take your dolphin necklace with us on the boat. He said it would be good luck. Everyone knows that dolphins are lucky for fishermen and sailors. But I reminded him how much you loved that sparkly little dolphin. You wore it everywhere we’d let you, and at night you hung it on the bedpost where it would catch a little starlight through your window and lull you to sleep. I told your daddy that he must leave it there for you to find, that you would want your dolphin necklace, that we shouldn’t take it.
Besides, we’ll have the dolphins swimming with our boat. And I’ll be looking for you, Karen, my sea-nymph—looking for you among the dolphins.
With all my love, always … Mom
(P.S. In case you need money—if there’s anywhere to spend it, or anything to buy—take the gold coins from your daddy’s collection. We’ve left them in the den for you.)
Carin’s throat was so tight, she barely managed to get the last lines out. As she finished reading the letter, neither she nor Verek seemed able to move for a time. Gently then, the wizard broke his embrace, stood, and went to his saddlebags. He fished out a bottle, uncorked it, had a swig, and offered Carin a drink.
She gulped mouthfuls of the burning liquid. It was some kind of horrible homebrew, local stuff, liquor that one of the campers had given to Verek this morning in trade for a fresh load of wood. It stung going down but it helped to steady her. Her hand that held the letter quit shaking so hard.
Carin felt for the crystal dolphin that she wore on a piece of twine round her neck. This was not the trinket she had treasured as a child. That particular dolphin was in Ruain now. She had fetched it there long ago, at Verek’s bidding, back in the days when she had felt certain the wizard planned to kill her.
The dolphin Carin now wore was identical to her sparkly childhood treasure, but this one had come from Morann’s collection of magical, bridge-building, world-breaching amulets. Around Verek’s neck hung the third one in the set. He wore his dolphin on a silver chain that had mountings for all three of the amulets. Whether Carin’s childhood treasure had ever hung from that chain, she had no way of knowing. But the two dolphins that she and Verek had seized from Morann had definitely been part of the same necklace. Carin had snatched away one of the pair to be her ticket to safety and her lifeline back to Verek.
She returned the wizard’s liquor. He took another long swig as he also fingered the crystal that he wore hidden under his shirt.
“Megella!” Verek suddenly shouted. “Where is that woman? We need her here.”
Carin scrambled to her feet. They stood together, Verek scanning the encampments that ringed the pond, Carin shading her eyes to study the two outliers.
“There,” she said, pointing. “Meg’s just coming out of those people’s tent.”
Verek waved vigorously, catching the wisewoman’s eye, motioning for her to come. As they stood watching Megella trundle toward their camp, Carin took Verek’s hand.
“Well, my lord, I can tell you one thing,” she said as Verek’s grip tightened in hers. “I’m never going back to that place. Earth is a world of blood and death.”
Chapter 7
An Opened Gate
Megella stopped several feet short of Carin and Verek. She stared from one troubled face to the other.
Oh, Drisha, she thought. Is someone else sick? Wheesht! Is it one of them?
The girl was fluttering papers at her. “Please come sit with us, Meg,” Carin said, pointing into the shade the wagon cast. “I have something to read to you. It explains a lot.”
“Or it explains nothing,” Verek muttered mysteriously from his station at the girl’s side.
Megella shook her head. “Not now, my ducks. We have a problem.” Reassured by the liveliness of the pair that neither of them suffered ill health, Meg jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the isolated encampment behind her. “In that tent is a child who is bleeding from her mouth and nose.”
“Beggar all!” Carin exclaimed as Verek swore a more scorching oath. “Is she bad?”
“Very bad. And rapidly worsening.” Megella raised her forefinger in warning. “I want both of you keeping your distance. I have no idea how contagious this sickness may be.”
“Tell me how I may help,” Verek said, leveling his dark gaze at her. “You know I am not entirely without skill as a healer.”
Megella nodded impatiently. “And that is why you must stay clear until we are sure what we’re dealing with. Those people there”—she indicated the campers around the stock pond—“will need you if this affliction spreads.”
She gestured at her wagon. “For now, you may be my hands. I dare not come closer, but I require every packet and bottle of medicine that I brought with me. Nothing I have tried so far has slowed the bleeding. The child lies near death.”
As Verek grunted something unintelligible and launched himself at the wagon, to toss aside Megella’s blankets and haul out her bags of potions, Meg turned to Carin. “Did you tell me, widgeon, that there is water in the ravines east of here?”
“Yes. A spring feeds a little stream.”
“Then ride there, and fill this from the spring.” Megella lobbed an empty waterskin; it landed in the grass some distance from Carin.
“Wait!” Meg cried as the girl started toward it. “Do not handle it barehanded any more than you must. Wrap it in one of my spare blouses or shawls, and as you carry it, hold it away from your body. Do not fill it at the pond. We cannot risk contaminating the water that everyone else here is drinking. Use the spring and trust the flow to wash away the possibility of pollution.”
Carin nodded. “I understand, Meg. I’ll be careful. You take care, too. Do you hear me?” the girl demanded, looking intently at her.
“I’ll be all right, duck,” Megella said, a bit testily to hide her pleasure at having
someone care enough to sound worried about her. It’d been a long time since anybody had. “I’ve attended at the bedsides of many who were diseased and dying, and I have never yet succumbed. I won’t catch this. I cannot afford to.”
Verek approached, carrying the bags of medicines.
“Come no closer, nephew. Toss them into the dust here,” Meg instructed, indicating a sand-filled depression. “Gently! If any bottle breaks, I have no way to replace it. These few remedies may be the only hope those people have.” She tipped her head toward the encampment at her back.
“How are you set for food? And firewood?” Verek almost snapped at her. He’d narrowed his gaze and he did not look pleased at being reduced to the role of helper.
He’s accustomed to calling the shots, that one is, Megella thought.
“I will need more wood,” she answered him. “Plenty of wood, and clean water—bring those first. But if you manage to down another antelope, then I will claim a haunch of it for my patient and her family. They have been living on bread and partridge-berries. A bite of meat might build the child’s strength.”
Carin had the waterskin swathed by now, in one of Meg’s blouses—one of her better blouses—and was holding it the way she might hold a sack of snakes.
“This is the time of day when the antelopes come to drink,” the girl said. “If we leave now, we should have good hunting.”
“Then go.” Megella picked up her bags of medicines. “While you are gone, I will be dosing my patient with every remedy I know. What does not kill her may cure her.”
* * *
By the next sunrise, however, the child was much worse. She bled from every orifice. Even her skin was oozing blood. No powder promoted clotting; no styptic, not even yarrow, stemmed the flow. The child was unable to swallow any of the teas or tonics that Megella brewed at the fire. As the solutions cooled, she dripped them into her patient’s mouth, eyes, and nostrils. They had no effect.
The parents no longer hovered at their child’s bedside. The father, too, had begun to bleed from his nose. He sat leaning forward so the blood did not run down his throat.
His wife sat beside him, holding his hand, looking from him to their dying child. The woman cried silently. The wetness that streamed down her face was a blend of tears and blood that quickly became only blood. By the time Megella had fixed the woman a fortifying tea, she was too weak to grasp the cup. Meg supported the woman’s head as she took a few sips.
It did no good. The disease defeated every remedy in Megella’s stock of cures. By late morning of this second day, all three of her patients were dead. The ground where they had pitched their tent was blood soaked.
Meg arranged the bodies side by side under the canvas. She put the family’s copy of the Drishanna into the child’s cold, gore-streaked hands. She stacked wood on the bodies, practically filling the tent with the ample pile of brushwood that Verek and Carin had supplied her with. Then she stripped off her stained clothes, stuffed them through the tent’s entrance, and set fire to the stack.
While it burned, she washed the victims’ blood from her face and body. Then she dressed in the clean clothes that Carin had tossed over for her, the girl obediently pitching the bundle across the literal line in the sand that Megella had drawn to forbid her companions from approaching too near.
For the rest of the day, she sat and waited. Meg sipped her tea in the shade of the victims’ wagon. She watched the neighboring campers pack up and leave.
Many had cleared out already. They had seen Carin and Verek tossing supplies over Meg’s boundary line, they had seen her duck into the victims’ tent and not come out for hours at a stretch, and obviously they had inferred enough from these omens of danger to put themselves to flight. Most had hitched up their wagons and headed back southward, since the northbound road remained blocked by an armed patrol. A few had abandoned their wagons, packed what they could on their horses, and walked or ridden east or west, traveling cross-country.
A few on the far side of the stock pond had delayed their departure, apparently willing to risk infection as long as Verek and Carin kept supplying them with all the fresh game they could eat.
Those two work together like they’re cut from the same cloth, Megella mused, watching the pair bring in two freshly killed antelope and deliver bundles of firewood to their few remaining neighbors. Verek was not even pretending to accept payment anymore. He stopped to speak with the dawdlers, and Meg could see him gesturing toward her.
What is he saying? That I’m not dead yet, so the disease must not be too contagious? Well, time will tell.
For her midday meal and again for her supper, Megella roasted chunks of antelope and ate handfuls of partridge-berries. Then she washed again thoroughly. She dusted her bags with the same powder she used for purifying water, shouldered them, and walked back toward her woodpecker wagon. She crossed her line in the sand just as Carin looked up from turning the meat that the girl was roasting for her own meal and Verek’s.
“Meg!” Carin exclaimed. “Are you all right?”
“I believe so,” Megella attested. “I have seen the bleeding disease run its course in mere hours. If I were fated to show symptoms of it, they would have manifested by now, I think. Will you trust me enough to accept me again into your company?”
“Of course,” Carin said. “Come to the fire. Here—let me take your bags.”
As Meg handed them over and the girl stepped away to stow them in the wagon, Verek spread a blanket on the ground.
“What happened, Aunt?” he asked quietly as they sat together. “The whole family—they succumbed so quickly?”
Megella nodded. “I have never seen anything like it. This disease bleeds people ashen. The progression was the same in the child and her parents, but quicker, in fact, in both adults. Bleeding first from the nose or the eyes, then from the mouth … and then, from everywhere.” Meg arched her back tiredly. “I tried everything I could think of—everything I had. The only saving grace is that this plague kills quickly. That family did not suffer long.”
“Do not say ‘plague,’” Verek muttered, looking around him as though he were worried that someone would overhear. But they were alone at the pond now. The last holdouts had struck camp and left, finally chased away by the long smoldering of the funeral pyre. The blaze Megella had lit was only now beginning to burn itself out.
Verek leaned toward her.
“Perhaps there is one other saving grace,” he said. “This disease does not seem to be easily communicable. I detected no sign of it in anyone I spoke with today. You—thank the powers—look well. And those bowmen who insist upon blocking the road”—he jerked his head in the direction of the patrol that, in the dusk, was visible by the light of several torches—“appear to be unaffected.”
Theil fingered the bow that leaned against the wagon wheel, the weapon that he always kept close. “They will stand aside in the morning,” he growled, “or they will fall where they stand.”
“You intend going on tomorrow?” Megella asked.
Verek nodded. “There is nothing to hold us here now.” He got to his feet as Carin came to stand with him at the fire. “And there is no one here to tend the horses of the dead.” He gestured toward the isolated encampment where a wagon stood abandoned behind the smoking remains of the tent and its occupants. Two bay bobtails—the horses of the wagon team—had been tethered at a distance and left to graze. They’d cropped all the grass they could reach, and the only water they had had since yesterday was a kettle full that Megella had lugged out to the poor beasts.
Together, Verek and Carin headed for the ownerless horses.
“Stay away from that wagon,” Meg called after them. “Until we know the source and virulence of this disease, I want you both to be careful what you touch.”
Each of them raised a hand, acknowledging that they heard her but not turning to look at her. They reached the bobtails and paused there a moment, speaking together in the twilight. The distance w
as too great for Megella to hear what they said.
In tandem then, the pair untied the horses and led the animals to the stock pond, and let them drink deeply before tethering them well away from the three horses of their own party.
“They’re not much,” Verek commented as he and Carin rejoined Megella at the fire. “Fit mostly for the knackers. But we’ll take them with us, if they still appear healthy in the morning. You saw no sign of disease in them, Aunt?”
“None,” she replied. “As you and I both know, however, horses and humans may share sicknesses. We will need to watch them closely.” She tilted her head. “Why do you want the pitiful beasts?”
“One could serve you as a saddle mount, Aunt Meg, if we are forced to abandon your wagon,” Verek said.
He put up his hand to quell Megella’s protest before she had even started it. “The bays are merely a precaution. I intend to continue along the road, and woe to any man who tries to block our path again. But either of those cobs of yours would do better as a pack animal than as a saddle horse. If the situation arises, we will be prepared to mount you on a horse that can well carry you.”
Carin made a little choking, snickering sound, confirming Megella’s suspicion that her cheeky nephew was casting aspersions on her weight.
Before Meg could think of a suitable rejoinder, Carin had come to sit next to her. The girl was riffling sheets of paper, and now she was not giggling. She looked so serious that Megella spontaneously put an arm around her and gave her a hug.
“What is it, widgeon? What are those papers?”
“It’s a letter,” Carin said softly. “A letter to me from my … um, from my mother.”
“Your mother!” Megella exclaimed. “Why, child! I didn’t know you had one. Where is she?”
The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3) Page 8
