The soldiers heave the patient into the container, then race back to the hospital with their empty stretcher.
I peer inside, where a dozen marshmen are laid out in a row, their hands bound with bright plastic restraints. In the depths of the container, an officer is setting up an arc lamp. I recognize him by the pale eyes and delicate mustache as a man named Reiff, one of Curtis’s adjutants. When we first met, he was a gunnery sergeant; now he wears the uniform of a lieutenant colonel.
Reiff aims the lamp at a bearded elder whose torso has been ravaged by the explosion. The man’s blackened rib bones are thrown into stark relief; the raw fibers of his intercostal muscle glint as he breathes. There’s a lot of shouting, but Reiff’s language skills are poor. I can barely make out the words, and only because I know how to adjust for his foreign accent.
Then he reaches in his pocket and produces a miniature plumber’s torch, which he lights with a flourish. He adjusts the flame to a brilliant blue pinpoint, then kneels and holds it to the elder’s open wound.
The marshman lets out a bloodcurdling cry. The others cry out, too, like dogs howling in response.
“Reiff!” I shout.
Reiff turns to me, his face purple with heat and exertion. “It’s Gus, right?” he asks. “The king of jibber-jabber? You’d better get in here.”
“These men belong in the ward.”
Reiff smiles sardonically. “Curtis warned me about your bullshit,” he says.
“They need to be moved. Right now.”
“No,” he says, “what they need is for you to get in here and translate for me.”
Master, gasps the marshman at my elbow, help me.
The face is thick with edema, but I can still recognize my canoe boy.
Chigger, I say, why have they brought you here?
He starts to answer, but is overcome by a coughing jag. His breath smells like charred meat. His lungs are finished. He won’t live through the night.
Reiff rushes over with the torch. “Good man!” he says. “Keep him talking. Ask him about their command structure. No, belay that—ask him what they’re planning to hit next.”
I look up in amazement and say, “Go fuck yourself.”
He squats to confront me. The torch hisses by my ear. “You do not want to go down that road, my friend,” he says.
“The marshmen have a word for someone like you,” I say. “Unclean.”
Reiff’s eyes narrow; he still hasn’t learned that supremely shameful word. He drives a rigid finger into my chest and bellows, “Out!” before turning his attention back to Chigger.
I pretend to walk calmly away. Then I free my sidearm.
But unlike the soldiers I’m used to, Reiff is a professional. The warm rubber grip is the last thing I feel before the ground leaps to my cheek.
* * *
I come to in the ward. My ears won’t stop ringing; each heartbeat is a fresh blow to my head. I cover my eyes against the light of the bedside candle.
It’s night. The ward is empty, save for Paul, who sits by me, whittling a reed with his homemade knife. I’m parched, but just as I start to ask for water, Paul gets up and races out to the hall.
I explore the back of my head with tentative fingers. There’s a decent gash, and the hair all around is matted with blood. The fact that the wound hasn’t even been laved is a puzzle that occupies my whirling mind.
The door flies open. Ah, my water, I croak.
Curtis steps into the room, looking taller and leaner than ever. The shine on his freshly shaven face seems to match his polished boots. He smells strongly of horses and cologne.
Paul scurries in after him, brandishing his homemade dirk. Curtis rests a hand on the boy’s head, then asks if he can have a look at the knife. Paul hands it over.
May I keep it for a while? Curtis asks.
Not too long! the boy says. Then he blushes, realizing he has just dictated terms to the general.
Don’t worry, Curtis says. I’ll give it back. He flips the boy a coin. Paul pockets it, then gently closes the door behind him.
“A good kid,” Curtis says, brushing reed shavings from the chair. He admires Paul’s knife for a moment before sitting down. “This is what a child of the marshes makes out of garbage,” he says.
With a smooth and easy motion, he hurls the knife at a bedpost across the room. It bites into the wood with a loud thunk. “Well balanced, too,” he says.
“Where are my patients?”
He waves off the question as he turns to me. “Part of this is my fault,” he says. “I vouched for you. I didn’t want to believe the reports. I had no idea you were so far gone.”
“You’re wrong about the pipeline,” I say. “These are poor people. This time of year, there’s always a shortage of cooking fuel.”
“Administrator!” he says. The word hangs in the air for a moment between us, vibrating with disgust. “You pulled a weapon on Reiff.”
“He was about to torture a child.”
“A child? What you don’t know about the enemy could fill an encyclopedia.”
“On the contrary,” I say. “He’s sitting with me right now.” And then it’s so quiet between us that I can hear the faint suckling of the candle.
“Well,” he says, “it’s over. In a few weeks, the last of the new levees will be done, and then we’ll pull the plug on these swamps, once and for all.”
“You’re draining the marshes?”
“Whoever controls the water, controls the marshman. I think you told me that once. No? It sounds like you, anyway.”
“Quick, give me the bowl,” I say. While I’m retching, a woman comes in with a pitcher. Curtis tells her to hurry up and leave, but she lingers by the bed.
This is the general? she asks. I recognize the voice. It’s the laundress.
Curtis answers for himself. I am the general, he says.
Good, she says. Here’s what I bought with your money.
She points awkwardly at his belly and fires before either of us can stop her. It’s an old service revolver, drawn from beneath her robe. The impact throws his chair backward and lands him in a heap on the floor. “Fuck!” he cries. “What the fuck?”
She pulls the trigger again, but the action has jammed. She drops the gun and looks around the room, her eyes wide with the fear of not finishing. When she spots the homemade knife, the relief is evident.
Curtis tries to unstrap his sidearm, but his fingers are slippery with blood and the legs of the chair interfere. He turns to me and says, “Get my gun.” Blood spurts from his abdominal aorta. “Get it,” he says, his words starting to slur.
I kneel down and pull it free.
“Shoot,” he gasps. But instead I toss it away.
There’s shouting at the door. Someone pounds it with the butt of a rifle.
The laundress walks up to him and places her foot on his gut, right where the bullet went in. She leans into it, adding her weight bit by bit as Curtis’s eyes roll back.
She turns and offers me the knife. I don’t take it; nor do I move to stop her.
She digs her fingers into his hair. She’s just touching the blade to his throat when the soldiers break through the door. One of them races over, slipping in the growing pool of blood. He’s very capable, though. Without fully regaining his balance, he manages to shoot her cleanly through the forehead.
I slowly raise my hands as more soldiers pour into the room. Curtis is deathly pale. He lifts a dripping finger and manages one final word. Every head turns to me.
“Traitor.”
III
(ELEVEN YEARS EARLIER)
1
Gus had been waiting in the café by the western gate for nearly two hours. He checked his watch to make sure it was set to local time. But of course it was. He’d changed it on the deck of the hospital ship. Officers were supposed to stay on fleet time, but months of boredom had put him in a defiant mood. He’d taken great pleasure turning back the hands for shore leave. The watch was
correct; the boy was simply late.
He ordered another cup of the sweet sludge that passed for coffee in the port city and buried himself in his phrase book, a poor crumbling thing he’d rescued from a bin behind his college library.
He stared at the coffee when it came, weighing whether or not to mention the insect wing that winked at him from the settling foam. After a while, he turned to the waiter, who was reading a newspaper at the counter, and tried out one of his favorite marsh idioms.
Often the river will swallow a man’s plans, he said, adding the marshman’s characteristic shrug for emphasis. At least he hoped it was characteristic. He’d seen it often enough in old movies.
The waiter, a native of some kind but apparently not a marshman, folded his newspaper with an angry flourish and said, “We don’t speak pidgin here.”
Gus smiled apologetically and asked for the bill. He felt foolish for assuming the waiter was a marshman. The port city was known as a melting pot, but the liberation of the marshes had polarized the locals into winners and losers. Perhaps the waiter’s tribe was among the losers.
He made sure to leave a large tip, giving the foreign bills a sharp rap with his knuckles as if money were somehow to blame for the misunderstanding. Then he slipped past the waiter and abandoned the café.
The real heat of the day had begun. The cobblestones glowed under a veil of dust. Gus decided to return to his hotel in case the boy had left word for him there. He tried not to look defeated as he quit the old city. He’d been told that pickpockets could sense when things had turned against a tourist. That’s when they liked to pounce.
He was dripping when he got back to the hotel, which was halfway up the escarpment that curved around the port like a copper bowl. His room wasn’t large, but there was a fine bathtub with gilded feet, a relic of a previous occupation. The tub was the room’s main attraction. That, and the view of the twin forts that guarded the straits of the bay.
After a cool bath, Gus sat on the balcony and worked a crossword. A maid brought him a clay pitcher covered with gauze. He hadn’t ordered it, but he accepted the pitcher with another marsh idiom. Where there is kindness, he said, no land is foreign. His words seemed to frighten the girl, who ran off before he could pull out his wallet.
The drink was warm and salty, with a hint of a bitter fruit he couldn’t identify. But despite the unpleasant taste, a glass of it quenched his thirst.
There wasn’t much to do until the boy turned up. An excursion to the marshes was out of the question without a guide. Gus had planned to give him something extra if the tour was halfway decent, but even as he fantasized about lecturing the boy for being late, he knew he wouldn’t deny him a tidy bonus. He was loath to punish a young person trying to lift himself up, especially here, in such a troubled corner of the world.
A goat appeared below the balcony and picked its way to the edge of the cliff, where it stopped to rub against a young palm tree, its pot-metal bell tolling rhythmically in the morning air.
Gus usually enjoyed a good crossword, but his eyes kept wandering down to the bay. The fleet was a series of smudges on the horizon maneuvering in and out of the haze. His hospital ship was out there somewhere, its pristine wards lined with empty beds.
He’d hoped to treat some marshmen, if only for bragging rights back home, but that hadn’t materialized. Hostilities were over long before he arrived—not that there were many casualties to begin with. The campaign had been prosecuted entirely by marshmen under the supervision of a handful of military advisers. The warlord’s troops had simply melted back across the northern border.
An air horn sang out in the harbor, two staccato notes followed by a long dolorous blast. Other horns joined in. Fishing dhows came and went, their sails never seeming to fill. Gus was surprised there was still fishing so late in the morning. Then again, what did he know about the local catch? He smiled at his presumption. There was guilty pleasure in knowing so little about a place.
He was beginning to think about lunch when a pack of noisy children drifted down from the parking lot. The youngest ones wore split loincloths or nothing at all. The rest were rowdy and hungry-looking—“feral” was the word that came to mind. They chased away the goat, then huddled at the base of the little tree and drew lots. The winner was a light-skinned girl in a pink dress whose hair was neatly braided. She was older than the others, and there was a quiet superiority about her that seemed to belong to the world of the hotel. Gus wondered if her parents were watching from another balcony.
She made a ceremony of taking off her sandals and arranging them on a rock. Then she reached under her dress and from a hidden fold produced a scrap of corrugated tin, a dangerous-looking thing the size and shape of a pocket comb. She put the scrap between her lips, wrapped her arms and legs around the tree, and started to climb, her dress filling with the hot breeze that rose from the harbor.
The tree flexed under her meager weight, its fronds shuddering each time she set her thighs. The higher she climbed, the more it bent toward the cliff’s edge. Soon the girl was bobbing over a steep drop. A hawk patrolled the emptiness far below the pale soles of her feet. Gus felt the urge to call out, Be careful! Instead, he reached for his camera.
She parted the fronds when she got to the top, isolating a small green fruit, then set about cutting it loose. She sawed the stem with hypnotic steadiness, stopping only to wipe the sweat from her brow. She was at it a long time. The other children lost interest and drifted away in twos and threes. One of the boys made off with her sandals, then thought the better of it and silently returned them.
Gus switched to a longer lens, the better to flatten the dramatic seascape behind her. This was his favorite kind of composition: a native at an unfamiliar task, framed by a suitably exotic backdrop.
The focus ring on the lens was loose. His equipment was secondhand, the best he could afford on a junior officer’s salary. Resolving the girl’s elegant silhouette took longer than it should have. Just as he was about to snap the picture, the blade slipped from her hand and tumbled away. A magician’s rose seemed to blossom in her palm.
She cried out, but it was more a cry of disgust than pain. Gus abandoned his camera and ran down to help. She was still high in the tree when he got to her. He told her to come down, first in in his own language, and then, when she showed no sign of understanding, in the marsh tongue.
She nodded, but kept twisting the fruit with her good hand to weaken the stem, yanking at it until it finally gave.
She took her time getting down, cradling the fruit like a favorite doll. The trunk of the tree was smeared with blood, but the fruit was unstained. Why she took such care to protect it was just one of the many questions Gus wanted to ask. Instead, he focused on her wound.
May I? he asked.
The girl nodded and extended her hand. Her shrewd brown eyes seemed to mock him, but he didn’t care. Here he was, at last, treating a child of the marshes!
She needed stitches. Come with me, he said.
The girl hesitated. He thought she might want help carrying the fruit, but in trying to take it, he inadvertently smudged the husk with blood.
She snatched the fruit and hurled it away. Gus watched it skip down the rocks, bouncing ever higher until it burst. This was a setback. He’d been hoping to get her to talk about the fruit while he stitched her up. Instead, he resolved to ask about the charm she wore on her neck, an ancient ceramic token set in a heavy band of silver. Perhaps she’d even be persuaded to sell it.
* * *
A foreigner’s hotel room interested the girl less than he would have imagined. She wasn’t even curious about his doctor’s bag, which he’d brought along for emergencies. He sat her on the bed, lined the bedside table with a clean towel, and laved the hand with bottled water. The cut was deep, but the blade had missed the tendons.
He prepared a shot of anesthetic. He was discreet about it; nevertheless, she shrank from the syringe. This will help, he said. Her refusal was adama
nt, so he gave her stitches without it.
She bore them stoically. Gus was worried that her cries might draw the wrong kind of attention, but she didn’t cry out, even when the suturing needle bit deep in the flesh. At first he kept up a reassuring patter, but she didn’t want it. Her face was rigid with concentration.
Afterward, she was thirsty. He poured her glass after glass of the salty drink until the pitcher was empty.
More? he asked.
She shook her head. Then she went to the big bathtub and started filling it.
No, he said, turning off the water. It was one thing to stitch a girl’s hand in his room, but something else to let her undress there. Your hand needs to stay dry.
She started filling the tub again, this time warning him off with her eyes.
In the end, Gus sat outside in the hallway while she had her bath. He left the door ajar in case someone came. Every time he heard a splash he called out, Keep it dry!, which she mimicked back at him.
Of course, she might have been saying something else. The marsh tongue didn’t really sound the way it looked in the pages of a book.
* * *
After the bath, she appeared at the door, her braids dripping all over the pink dress. She led him away from the room with a certain urgency, as if she were suddenly nervous about being discovered inside the hotel. And, in fact, as they crossed the lobby, the clerk rose from his wicker stool and began to berate her. She answered with an imperious toss of her chin.
When they were outside, Gus realized he’d left his camera. He turned back for it, but she grabbed his sleeve and pulled him away from the hotel. He didn’t really resist. From time to time he even closed his eyes against the glare and let himself be led. He’d started the morning as a tourist, but now he was something more: a physician with his patient. Surely that conferred a kind of protection, even in the port city.
They walked down the driveway and out onto the road, where they were soon overtaken by an old hansom loaded with sacks of grain. The girl called to the driver, who climbed down from the spring board to help her in. Gus tried to squeeze in among the sacks, too, but there wasn’t room. He was willing to sit up top, but the girl barked instructions, and the driver set to work heaving his bulky cargo to the side of the road. When Gus was finally settled, the poor dripping man climbed back up, touched the nag’s ribs with his whip, and the carriage lurched forward.
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