Peregrin

by A. Sparrow

  Frantically, he adjusted the secondary array until every beam converged, and then he wrenched open the baffle. The main mirror bloomed with the radiance of a second sun, telling Raacevo and its environs that all was not clear.

  Chapter 20: The Cache

  Frank retired to his corner of the loft that night feeling like a sponge wrung of every last drop of liquid. His joints ached from days of walking. His head swam with schools of half-formed and conflicting thoughts that tried to give sense to Liz’s baffling hostility towards him. His feelings towards her had only burnished over their twenty years of separation. How had hers become so tarnished and corroded?

  He collapsed onto a sack of soiled and musty hay, fearing what the next morning would bring for Tom. If sepsis set in, the reaper would stake his claim. Frank would be helpless to stop anything without IV antibiotics.

  And then would Liz blame him? Would he blame himself? The only gift he had brought to her, his healing skills, was just an empty conceit without the tools of his trade.

  Clearly, Frank had appeared out of the blue during an extraordinarily stressful time. Her son lay bedridden with a belly wound about to fester and poison his blood. She had lost this Bimji fellow—boyfriend, husband, or whatever he was. Her farm had been attacked. She had refugees underfoot.

  But it was Frank’s nature to find blame in his own actions. He had always felt responsible for her disappearance in Belize, ever haunted by his decision to stay behind in Rio Frio while Liz went touring up the Macal River with Father Leo. Perhaps the same demon spawned a grudge that Liz managed to sustain for all these years.

  He slept off and on. Sometimes he could hear Tezhay snore or talk in his sleep across the loft. When awake, he stared at the stars through the open eaves. A chill breeze filtered in through gaps in the vertical planks. The stink of his unwashed body wafted up when he rolled over on the lumpy straw.

  The barn door creaked open. Hoofs scuffed clay and something snorted. Ellie called up into the barn, speaking Giep’o. A dark shape scuttled towards the ladder.

  “Tezhay?” said Frank. “That you?”

  Tezhay stopped and turned. “Doctor Frank, do you not sleep?”

  “Off and on,” said Frank. “More off than on.”

  Ellie called up again, her voice impatient. Tezhay answered her, curtly.

  “Where’re you going?” said Frank. “So early.”

  “Ellie, she takes me up to hills. We try and find you some kit.”

  “Hang on a sec,” said Frank, rustling up from the straw. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Is too much climb,” said Tezhay. “Hard for your heart.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Frank, pulling on sandals.

  “Stay, be near your woman,” said Tezhay. “Maybe today she be nice.”

  “Nah, I’m going with you,” said Frank. “I insist.”

  Tezhay sighed. Frank followed him down the ladder, treading gingerly across the barn floor, although the corpses were gone. Someone had come for them during the night. It smelled more like a barn, less like a charnel pit.

  Ellie stood in the lane with a pair of donkeys, their manes lightly burnished by a sliver of moonshine and a billion stars. The sky was mostly clear, with a few strips of cloud fringing the mountains. Lightning pulsed somewhere far beyond the horizon. Frank took a deep breath to counter a lightheadedness that had more to do with a lack of blood sugar than oxygen.

  “Keep your voices low,” said Ellie, whispering. “Mom doesn’t know I’m up, and she’s a light sleeper.”

  They went to the end of the lane and veered up a steep gulch that led them onto a tilting plateau of undulating meadow and isolated copses of trees.

  The sky lightened as they climbed. Grey became green.

  Frank was almost grateful to be away from Liz, the distance quelling any awkward urges to confront her, giving him some space and time to process why she felt the way she did. Perhaps Ellie could offer some insight to her mother’s thinking.

  As they climbed, the tension that had encased Frank fell away like a sloughed shell. His heart, lungs chugged away without a hitch. The donkeys maintained a languorous pace, stopping often to nibble, in no hurry to reach their burdens. Frank had no trouble keeping up.

  Diffuse herds of goat and sheep speckled the hillsides. The upper meadows still sopped from the two days of rain. Life had exploded among the dead and bleached traces of last year’s forage; flower stalks and new blades of green grass knifed through the thatch.

  The donkeys threaded their way through a natural wall of crumbling ledges to another sweep of unbroken meadow stretching to the roots of the higher mountains.

  A grey blotch that Frank had mistaken for a boulder gradually resolved into a squat, stone cabin with a sod roof. Two shepherds stood before it, baying dogs beside them, watching them approach.

  Tezhay walked right past them, his eyes intent on the dozens of steep-walled mounds jutting from the landscape. Ellie went up to the men and chatted with them. The younger of the two gawked at Frank like he was a circus freak.

  “Asao says he knows you, Mr. Tezhay,” said Ellie.

  “Oh yes?” said Tezhay, head whipping around. He strode over and greeting the men with shoulder bumps and hugs. He came back and whispered to Frank. “I no remember this guy. I just pretend.”

  Tezhay wandered off into the field of mounds. The grayed carcass of a small cart lay upended, one wheel missing in the tall, brown grass. Shattered barrels were strewn around it.

  Tezhay counted off four mounds, glanced back at the cabin and veered off, stopping before a mound like the others. Boulders studded its periphery like gems around the base of a crown. They were river stones, naturally rounded, each defaced by a divot or a chip. Frank ran his finger through one of the blemishes.

  “Those are keyholes for keepsakes,” said Ellie. She removed a pinkish wedge of granite from her pocket. “This one’s for my little sister Fanny. It matches her boulder and only her boulder.”

  Tezhay circled the barrow studying each stone. He stopped before one, pried it out of the sod and rolled it down the slope.

  Ellie gasped.

  “No worry,” said Tezhay. “Is no one bury here.” The surface of the boulder he had displaced was completely unblemished.

  A barrel lay shattered in the weeds. Tezhay ripped off one of the staves and stabbed it into the side of the mound. “Help me dig,” he said.

  Frank pulled off a stave and helped Tezhay cut through a dense tangle of sod to reach the soft, red earth below. Tezhay yanked a long, bleached bone out of the clay and tossed it into the weeds.

  Ellie’s eyes went wide. She covered her mouth with her hand.

  “Relax,” said Tezhay. “Is from sheep.”

  A few more scoops and they struck slate. Tezhay carved away the earth until he exposed the entire slab. Frank helped him pull it away, to reveal an arched opening framed by blocks of stone. The smell of mildew and rancid oil wafted out.

  Tezhay got down on his knees and crawled in. He reached in and dragged out a box the size of a coffin, the wood rotted at the corners and coming apart at the joints. He pried open the lid.

  “This better not be someone’s uncle,” said Frank.

  “No worry,” said Tezhay, picking at a seam of pitch that sealed the box. “I know this box.”

  The lid snapped in two and Frank staggered back. He peered into the opening, reached in and pulled out a pouch of thick brown plastic.

  “MRE,” said Frank. “Meals Ready-to-Eat.”

  “Food,” said Tezhay.

  “In theory, anyway,” said Frank.

  He thumbed the black printed labeling. “Jeez! These things are like ten years old.”

  “Must be spoil, yes?” said Tezhay.

  “Well, they’re MREs, so they’re probably okay,” said Frank. “Okay as MREs get, anyhow. It’s not as if they can taste any worse.”

  Frank reached back in and felt around, and touched something cold and hard and heavy. �
�There’s … guns in here.” He ripped another chunk of lid off and worked a rifle out of the hole. It looked like an AK-47 but had odd attachments on top and a fixture for a gas canister. Frank read aloud from a tag dangling from the trigger guard.

  “The T68 AK47 features the same inherent reliability and durability of our T68 line, by virtue of being made almost completely of metal. To replicate the real deal, the butt stock and hand guard are made of wood. The T68 AK47 can be powered by CO2 or compressed air and is compatible with any size air tank or cylinder.” Frank looked up at Tezhay. “This is a dang paintball rifle.”

  “Paint? Ball?” said Tezhay. “Explain please.”

  “It’s a replica, made to look real,” said Frank. “A toy for grownups to play war.”

  Tezhay grabbed the weapon from Frank. “You wrong. This real,” he said. “Just like the one the boy has. The one he kills the Crasacs.”

  “Nope. It’s a toy,” said Frank. “Doesn’t bode well for my medical kit.”

  Tezhay’s brow crinkled skeptically. “What it shoots?”

  Frank fished out a cardboard box and ripped it open. “These,” he said. An avalanche of brightly colored, translucent balls tumbled down onto what remained of the coffin’s lid.

  Tezhay sucked his teeth “Is bad.”

  “Why?” said Frank. “What’s all this for?”

  “Is part of old plan,” said Tezhay. “To fight Venep’o. This plan, as you can see, it has fail.”

  Frank knelt down and pulled more gear out of the coffin: another paintball rifle, more MREs, CO2 cartridges, paintballs, hoppers. Ellie walked between them, picking the little jawbreaker-sized paintballs out of the grass as if they were berries.

  “Nothing medical in this box,” said Frank, heat rising to his face.

  Frank picked up a white cardboard box that disintegrated in his hands. Cigar-shaped objects wrapped in white paper, twisted at the ends, tumbled out. It was heavy and malleable like clay.

  “What the hell are these?” he said.

  Tezhay took it from him carefully and gathered up the rest. “No touch. Is danger.”

  Ellie crouched down before the chamber. “I see another box in here,” she said. She squirmed into the crypt and slid it out. Broken glass chimed each time she bumped it.

  “Oh, that didn’t sound good,” said Frank. He helped Ellie slide it out onto the grass and tore the lid off, pawing through a layer of oil cloth to reveal a litter of broken vials and ampoules, crusted together with mold and salt from punctured IV bags. A label on a glass shard read penicillin.

  “Oh man,” said Frank. “This would have been good to have.”

  Frank salvaged whatever was salvageable: syringes, field dressings, foil tubes of bacitracin. He scraped some gunk off the diaphragm of a stethoscope and tucked it around his neck.

  “There’s one more big box,” said Ellie, on her elbows, grunting as she worked it back a few inches at a time. “This one’s heavy.”

  Frank helped her wrestle it out of the crypt. His expectations sank when he saw it all bashed in and rotted. The lid was loose and popped off easily. Beneath the layer of oil cloth were boxes of bullets, stacks of stained twenty and hundred dollar bills and several zippered bags of olive drab nylon.

  Tezhay snatched up the cash, along with an oblong bundle wrapped in more oil cloth. A flap fell away to reveal hinged device with slats and dials.

  “That a … tabulator?” said Frank.

  “Never mind,” said Tezhay, stuffing the cash inside the lining of his jacket.

  Frank stared at him. Tezhay’s eyes wandered like a guilty but unrepentant child’s.

  “Go find your medicine,” said Tezhay.

  Frank picked up one of the olive drab bags. Their aluminum zippers were crusted white with corrosion but gave way with only a little bit of force. One pocket was crammed with sterile battle dressings and gauze—a vast improvement of the rags they had been binding wounds with down at the farm. Another contained dental floss for tourniquets, scissors and hemostats, airways and tape.

  Frank grabbed another bag.

  The next bag tinkled as Frank handled it. He sighed as he unzipped the top flap, expecting more destruction. He found, as expected, more broken glass, but like jewels among the shards floated several intact ampoules—morphine, penicillin and ampicillin—lyophilized and needing only reconstitution with some of the sterile saline he had salvaged from the first coffin.

  Frank’s heart fluttered benignly. The windfall fed his spirit like manna. Doctor Frank was back in business.

  Tezhay slithered out of the crypt with a pair of rifles. He pointed one at Frank, playfully.

  “Toy, yes?”

  “Uh … no,” said Frank. “That one’s real.”

  ***

  Frank watched Ellie cinch the last bundle onto one of the donkeys, most of it ammo from boxes fished from deep in the crypt. Frank insisted on carrying all of the medical gear himself. The first donkey was already waddling back down the meadows towards the farm.

  Tezhay had retrieved a total four real AKs and six paintball guns. Frank could only figure that Tezhay refused to believe they were toys.

  Tezhay stood off by himself up near the goat house, gazing up into the mountains. He seemed lost in thought, almost in trance. Frank came up behind him, and followed his line of sight, finding nothing but goats and grass and mountains.

  “What do you see?” said Frank

  Tezhay jumped a bit. “Nothing,” he said, and stalked off after the donkeys.

  They arrived back at the farm after midday, well behind the donkeys. Frank went straight to Tom’s room, where he found Liz standing by his bed.

  “Well, well,” she said. “I thought you and your friend had gone and kidnapped my daughter.”

  “How’s he doing?” said Frank, rushing over to the bed. Tom was flushed and sweaty. He had kicked off his blanket. Frank lifted Tom’s dressing to reveal an inflamed wound, its edges swollen and puckered like lips.

  “Fever’s coming up,” said Liz. “He’s been unconscious, delirious. But it might be the herbs the healers gave him. He keeps dreaming out loud about giant birds trying to wrap him in their wings. I keep telling him I shooed them way but it doesn’t help. His pet nightmare … he’s been having it since he was just a little thing.”

  “Got something here that should help him,” said Frank, a heat flaring in his gullet.

  Not a flicker in her eyes gave Frank any hint that his words had reassured her.

  Frank removed a pair of glass hypodermics he had padded with gauze. I need these sterilized. “Can you boil some water?”

  “We always keep a kettle on the fire,” said Liz. She nodded to Ellie who was looking on from the doorway.

  Frank tried the stethoscope, but the diaphragm was too clogged with gunk to work. Tom’s pulse was fast but strong.

  “He’s got a raging infection going,” said Frank. “But it hasn’t gone septicemic. I don’t see any hemorrhaging under the skin. That’s a good sign.”

  Ellie rushed back in, hauling a massive iron kettle. Frank took apart the syringes, rinsed a basin with hot water, added the syringes, and immersed them. He pulled the two vials from his bag, similarly cushioned with gauze and put them down carefully on the table by the basin.

  “Whatcha got?” said Liz, stepping forward.

  “Antibiotics,” said Frank. “Penicillin for the gram negative bacteria. Ampicillin for the gram positives. It’s nice we have both. Otherwise it’d be a crap shoot.”

  He assembled syringes and stuck a clean needle on each, wiped an IV bag’s valve with an alcohol pad and jabbed one in. He picked up the vial of penicillin and poked its membrane, pumping sterile saline in and out several times to reconstitute the dried antibiotic.

  “Here, wipe the crook of his elbow with this.” Frank handed the alcohol pad to Liz. Tom had easy veins, but Liz and Ellie both winced as Frank injected him. Frank repeated the process with the ampicillin.

  “Nice
to know you still make house calls,” said Liz.

  Frank smiled. “The cab fare’s on me.”

  “So how’s he look?” said Liz. What’s your prognosis?”

  “Can’t say for sure,” said Frank. “Don’t know how nicked up his organs. But things look promising. This could have been a lot worse. He’s gonna need another shot, most likely.”

  Liz went up to Tom and smoothed his hair. She squeezed his limp hand.

  “This is how Doren passed,” said Liz. “Same kind of wound. Maybe lower, deeper.”

  “Doren was my Uncle,” said Ellie.

  Liz leaned over and kissed Tom’s forehead.

  “He looks just like you, Liz,” said Frank. His throat knotted. His eyes seeped. “Is he ours, Liz?” Frank blurted. “Is Tom … our son?”

  Liz turned slowly to face him. Frank gave her a chance to speak, but her eyes retracted, her features hardened. She got up and stalked out of the room.

  Chapter 21: News from Maora

  Wind vibrated the aperture of the temple dome like a blown jug, its drone rivaling the temple’s steam horn in volume. The watch deck rattled, its floor conducting vibrations through the Alar Benka’s bones, chattering his teeth as he knelt, praying for the Mercy of Cra.

  No other temple that Benka had served in his long career had ever sung like this one. An accident of construction, its resonance derived from a combination of curve and overhang that caused it to moan whenever the wind came from the south or west. Yet another quirk that made his posting in Gi so special.

  The day’s visitors—a Brother from Maora, a Polu liaison from Qualla—waited in the courtyard below with Benka’s advisors, cycling through their own prayers beneath the monolith of Cra, its hooded pinnacle rising well above the temple’s rim. They knew better than to join their Alar, respecting his daily ritual of taking prayers atop the dome, alone but for the pair of sentries keeping watch over the plateau.

  Between prayers, Benka’s eyes drifted to the southern mountains and the Mercomar, first in a chain extending to the distant plains of his homeland. Other relays led north to Verden and east to Maora: the walled resettlement colonies intended to be the seeds of expansion.

  To the west, there was nothing. Rugged terrain combined with an unusually organized and vigorous Giep’o resistance had rendered the entire sector off-limits to colonists. The ruins of a burned tower across the marshes reminded the Alar of this unfortunate truth each morning.