Peregrin

  “You really think this thing will blow over?” said Frank.

  “Always has before,” said Liz. “I bet it’s the dang Nalkies riling things up. I say let them have their colonies. Maybe they’ll leave the rest of us alone.”

  “How long has all this fighting crap been happening?” said Frank, putting the finishing touches on the girl’s wound with a tight chain of sutures.

  “Ever since I came here,” said Liz. “Though in the old days it was all clans and bandits. One thing the Venep’o did was get all of Gi … well most of it, anyhow … all pointing in the same direction – against the invaders. But the Sinkor do get their share of converts, and then there are those dang Polus.”

  “You stayed safe … through all that?” asked Frank.

  Liz’s eyes flared. “Safe? What do you care? I made it through, did I not?”

  “Just wondering … how your life was.”

  “My life was hell,” said Liz. “I’ve been raped more than once, beaten. Some years I starved. Had fevers and rashes that nearly did me in. One made me blind for a month. And my babies. It’s hell keeping a baby alive in this place. Took me years to get it worked out to have a decent life. Leo did better somehow. He had help early on. Didn’t hurt that that man was so good with languages, and that the Giep’o took to his proselytizing.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t give a fuck and I don’t mind saying so,” said Liz. “That man was no Christian.”

  “How long were you with him?”

  “Frank! I don’t need this interrogation. What’s the point? Here is where I am and there you are in your place and that’s that.”

  “We’re both here. In the same place. Right now,” said Frank.

  Liz exhaled, exasperated. “Now can we check on Tom?”

  ***

  He followed Liz out back, passing an array of rinsed and recycled bandages dangling like prayer flags from a tree, stained with dark blotches like Rorschach shapes or Shrouds of Turin. They ducked behind the heavy curtain that kept out the flies and breezes.

  Frank put his hand on Tom’s forehead. He felt warm, but his fever seemed to have broken. He had good color. His pulse remained quick, but strong. At the very least he seemed to have gotten no worse since morning, and maybe had made some subtle improvement.

  “I think he’s doing … good,” said Frank. “We’ll need to keep up the antibiotics. Wish I could set up an IV drip, but I don’t have the gear.”

  “He going to be okay?” said Liz, hovering at Frank’s elbow, Tom’s hand clasped in both of hers.

  “Next twenty-four hours will be key,” said Frank.

  “Is he going to be okay?” said Liz, more forcefully.

  “The indications are positive,” said Frank.

  “You’re telling me, you don’t know?”

  “I’m just giving it to you straight, Liz. Without blood tests, I can’t be sure what’s going on inside him.” His foot jostled a crock that functioned as a bed pan. “Kidneys are working,” said Frank, noting a bit of water vapor skimming along the surface. “That’s a good sign.”

  “He’s my only Tom,” said Liz. “He needs to get better.”

  “And I think he will,” said Frank. “I promise, I’ll do everything I can.”

  Liz looked directly into Frank’s eyes as they spoke. Her gaze sent tingles through him. He marveled how far they had come from that initial reunion when Liz had run off to hide without speaking to him. He imagined that this was how Diane Fossey must have felt when she made her breakthroughs communicating with mountain gorillas. But it struck him as an absurd way to be thinking about his own wife.

  Frank looked at Tom carefully, studying the ruddiness of his cheeks, the curl of his beard. Ripples moved through Frank’s insides as a question wavered on his tongue. It slipped.

  “How old is Tom, Liz?”

  Her eyelids flickered. “Older than Ellie.”

  “How old is that?”

  “Late teens.”

  “Now, Liz, I’m serious. Is there any chance—?”

  Liz popped up off her chair. “There’s something going in out there.”

  “Liz … wait!”

  Ellie ducked her head in the door. “Mom, you’d better come?”

  “What’s going on?” said Liz.

  “I’m not sure,” said Ellie. Liz stepped outside after Ellie. Frank followed them around to the front of the porch.

  A man was coming up the lane escorted by villagers, who led him straight to Liz. Liz engaged him in rapid fire Giep’o. After a brief squabble, they seemed to reach some sort of consensus.

  “What did he say?” said Frank.

  “Don’t put your things away just yet,” said Liz. “Get ready to get busy. They’ve got some casualties for you. Seems the Nalkies want to occupy my valley.”

  “You’re gonna let them?”

  “Do I have a choice?” said Liz. “Me and what army’s going to hold them back?”

  ***

  Liz stayed with Frank and assisted him as well or better as any trauma nurse he had worked with in an ER. She even taught him a few tricks about splinting and suturing with locally available materials. Other healers joined them as the porch filled up with the wounded, many with injuries far graver than Eaamon’s.

  Several of the fighters joined them in assisting the injured. Frank gathered, from their collections of bandages and salves that they were some sort of medics or healers. Their methods both baffled and impressed him. They seemed to have a knack for extricating barbs from flesh without needing to cut.

  Frank got up to stretch and looked down the line of casualties spilling out onto the muddy lane.

  “We should be doing triage,” he said. “Can you explain that to these healers?”

  “Triage?”

  “Save who’s savable and needs saving,” said Frank.

  “I suspect that’s been done already,” said Liz. “No one’s come to us with a sprained ankle or a skinned knee. And it looks to me like they left the worst cases behind.”

  “You have a point,” said Frank, diving back in to help a soldier with compound fractures that bent his lower leg in two places.

  With the added help, they moved through the line swiftly, depleting the contents of several of the aid packs they had retrieved from the cache. Bandage wrappings, emptied neosporin packets and IV bags littered the porch.

  They had been at it for hours, but Frank almost regretted seeing the flow of casualties slow. It meant that his one-on-one time with Liz. For the first time since he had arrived, her casual, friendly banter made him feel like they worked for the same team. It resurrected a glimmer of the way they used to be together. The bits of the old Liz that slipped through the cracks of her tough façade fascinated him and made him hungry to see more.

  Frank’s hands quivered with the same vital force he had felt when she first approached him down the lane. He remembered this feeling from their courtship, when Liz’s voice over the phone could make his every cell hum. This is how it felt to be alive, so different from the automaton-like existence he had maintained for years after her loss.

  “So you lived in DC?” said Liz. “Downtown?”

  “For a while,” said Frank. “In a condo near the zoo,” said Frank, wrapping a strip of homespun around a young man’s leg to protect the glancing saber wound he had just stitched. “Later, I moved to Bethesda to be closer to work.”

  “I can’t believe you never remarried,” said Liz. “What were you waiting for?”

  Frank reached for a roll of tape he had recovered from the cache, but his hand met the floor of the porch. A little boy had snatched it up and was making for the lane. “Not again,” said Frank. Another healer grabbed the boy and brought him back, still clutching the roll of tape. Liz pried it from his fingers, ripped off a piece for the boy to play with and handed it back to Frank.

  Frank looked around for another casualty to work on and was surprised and relieved to have hit a lull. br />
  “Wasting your life away waiting … for nothing,” said Liz.

  “It wasn’t … for nothing. I found you, didn’t I?”

  “You had no way of knowing what happened to me. What if I was dead?”

  “You aren’t,” said Frank. “I don’t know why … but I never believed you were.”

  “Then you were a fool,” said Liz. “Doesn’t matter that you turned out to be right. You’re still a fool.” Her eyes locked onto his. “You had no inkling about this place. None. Didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t,” said Frank. “How could I even have imagined it?” Frank leaned back against a post.”But if I did … I would have found some way to get here … years ago.”

  “Then you would have wasted your life here, instead,” she said. “Coming here … it’s a one way trip. You do realize that, don’t you?”

  Frank sat up. “But it’s not,” he said. “There’re ways to go back.”

  “Bullshit,” said Liz.

  “It’s true! I’ve been back. Tezhay … he knows the ways. There are stones—”

  “Wait. You came here, went back … and … came back … again?”

  “Yeah,” said Frank.

  Liz’s eyes scanned his face, the way she used to when she suspected him of lying.

  “If that’s true …” she said. “Then, you’re an even bigger fool than I thought. Twenty years … has it been? All that time I haven’t met a single … Urep’o … who managed to find their way back. How is it you manage to go back and forth like you’ve got a subway pass?”

  “They don’t want us to go back, believe me,” said Frank. “But I got caught up … with Tezhay … in a bit of a tangle. We were prisoners … in a Venep’o camp. We had to use a stone to escape … and then … I was in Arizona … but I didn’t want to go home yet … I wanted to look for you.”

  “Stone?” she said. Her eyes shed pity on him. “Your face. I can still see the young man you were … probably easier than you can see what I used to be.”

  “Not true,” said Frank. “I see you and you’re still Liz.”

  Liz kinked one corner of her mouth. “Point is … I can see the oldness starting to creep into your face. I see that, and it makes me sad, Frank. You’re a good man. You could have made some woman very happy. We only have one life. And you wasted yours. I don’t get why you did that.”

  “There’s only you, Liz,” he said. “I’m a one woman man.”

  Her eyes wandered restlessly before falling on her calloused hands. She looked up at him. “A fucking song bird is what you are, Frank. Mated for life. What a waste.” She got up and strolled to the end of the porch.

  “Oh, my Lord, look at them all coming!”

  A flood of soldiers had appeared on the terraces and came up the lane. Frank came up beside her.

  “Wonder why they’re all coming up here?” said Frank.

  “They’d better be bringing their own food,” said Liz. “No way we can feed these many mouths. What are all these Sesep’o doing here? Look at them trample our fields!”

  She hobbled around the porch rail. Frank offered his arm to help her down the steps. She shouted in Giep’o at the crowd of fighters collecting in front of the lower outbuildings.

  “I see Tezhay,” said Frank. “Misty and Miles are with him.”

  “Oh, thank God she’s safe,” said Liz. She stopped mid-stride. “Bimji?” Her jaw trembled.

  “What? What did you say?” said Frank, still clinging to her arm.

  “Bimji. Oh my God! It’s Bimji!”

  She pulled away from Frank and ran, momentarily forgetting her bum hip. Frank hurried after her. She made it to the barns before the pain caught up with her. She nearly crumpled but Frank was there to catch her.

  A frail looking man with a patchy beard stepped away from the group standing with Tezhay, his eyes wide in their sunken sockets. Liz limped straight up to him and melted into his arms.

  “They said you were dead,” said Liz.

  Frank watched her clutch Bimji’s jacket, kneading his arms, rubbing his hair, his cheek. Tears dribbled down her face.

  “Oh Jeez!” He winced and stared until he could stand no more. He backed away, found the corner of the barn, slipped and stumbled his way to the back entrance. His eyes fogged with moisture. He staggered over to the ladder and climbed up into the loft, retreating into the dimmest corner, collapsing in the soiled hay.

  Frank reached into a pocket and pulled out the jar of bolovo. He gazed out through the hole left by a missing board at a rocky pinnacle poking into sky like a taunting finger. He opened the jar and looked down at the putrid slime within, tempted to swig the entire contents. Instead, he dipped his finger and swiped it against the inside of his cheek; enough, he hoped, to dull his senses. Within moments, Frank’s heart began to thud deep and slow. He left the vale and its dramas behind.

  Chapter 45: Evasion

  Ara ripped free of Seor’s arms and grabbed hold of a severed branch. Seor kicked it away before Ara could bludgeon her.

  “Simmer down! It’s me.”

  Ara stopped struggling. “Seor?” she said, her voice rising in amazement.

  “Hush!” Seor whispered. “What are you doing here? I hope you’re not here to meet Baas.”

  “No,” said Ara. “I would never … I had no idea he was here.”

  “Then why did you cross?”

  “To … get away.”

  There would be time to let her explain later. Seor’s priority was getting them out of the open and under cover. Seor took Ara’s hand and pulled her back towards the strip of trees overlooking the athletic fields. She felt her strength giving way and had to lean on Ara for support until she caught her breath.

  “You’re hurting,” said Ara.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re here with … Baas?”

  “Not voluntarily,” said Seor. “He kidnapped me. Tied me up. Not as securely as he should have. I pretended to be a little weaker than I was, to keep him off his guard. He also didn’t know about the little blade I kept in my cuff, the one I took from the healers.”

  A roar of frustration resounded in the woods.

  Seor sucked air through her teeth. “He sees that I’m gone. We’d best go hunker down low somewhere. He’ll be out hunting us tonight.”

  “Hunting you, perhaps. He doesn’t know I’m here,” said Ara. “I followed him, unseen.”

  “Excellent,” said Seor. “That gives us an advantage.”

  “Beneath these trees,” said Ara, pulling back a branch for Seor to pass. “The undergrowth is thick. The Urep’o call them ‘mountain laurels.’ We’d be out of sight even in daylight.”

  ***

  Seor and Ara kept their conversation sparse to avoid detection. For hours, Baas tromped through forest and field with an obsessive determination, before he went silent. Seor could not exclude the possibility that he did so to bait them into thinking that he was asleep or gone.

  Through whispers Seor learned that Ren had passed, and that news was enough to render her silent until her tears drained her dry. She tried not to sniffle, wiping her nose on the scratchy leaves.

  “Vul?” she said, softly.

  “He’s fine,” whispered Ara. “Pari and Canu as well. Canu, despite himself.”

  “I can only imagine,” said Seor. “That boy leads a charmed existence. How many times he should have died, while Ren, the most cautious among us, perishes.”

  Tears flowed anew.

  “I’m proud of you,” said Seor. “And grateful.”

  “For what?” said Ara.

  “For taking care—” Something crashed through the brush. It leapt to high and moved too swiftly to be Baas. Most likely a deer. “For taking care of my friends.”

  ***

  Morning light came, revealing the presence of blueberry bushes interspersed among the laurels. While Seor slept, Ara harvested pockets full of the tiny berries, popping only a few in her mouth to abet her hunger pangs, saving
the rest to share.

  Ara sat pitying Seor’s appearance, how gaunt she looked from her weight loss, how much she seemed to have aged over the course of the few weeks since she had last seen her.

  When Seor awoke, they breakfasted on berries and beetle grubs cracked out of a rotten log, took turns watching for Baas while the other peed. Their only source of water was the dew they licked from leaves and sucked from sheathes of grass.

  “We’ve heard nothing,” said Seor. “Seen nothing. Can we move?”

  “I suggest we stay put until we sight him,” said Ara. “I know his tactics. He prides himself on his mindless patience. He bragged that he sat for days once for the chance to pounce on a deserter.”

  “Days?”

  “Days,” said Ara.

  “But what of the convergence?” said Seor. “Might he move on without us?”

  “He might,” said Ara. “Did he tell you when the next one arrives?”

  “Tonight,” said Seor. “But he said it’s to be a small one.”

  The sun hung halfway to noon when they spotted a dark shape moving across the meadow into the forest. Not a bear as Ara initially though, this was Baas. Another soccer game was underway in the athletic fields below. Larger children this time. Teens. The aromas of food wafted up the hillside.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Ara. “You stay put.”

  “Careful,” said Seor.

  Ara slinked down the hill, keeping under cover of the tall weeds as much as possible. She wished she had some money as they were selling hotdogs from a stand. Instead, she gathered several half bags of popcorn that children had abandoned and made her way back up the hill.

  Seor appreciated the snack, devouring the sack Ara had given her and the remainder of Ara’s.

  “Did you get enough?” said Seor. “Are you sure?”

  “I had plenty,” said Ara, her eyes lingering on Seor’s jutting cheekbones, sharp enough to split a melon.

  “We thought you were dead,” said Ara.

  “You were right,” said Seor. “The Urep’o healers are good. I wish now that you had left Ren behind.”

  “I’m not sure … they could have saved her,” said Ara. “Her wounds were dire.”

  Seor lifted her shirt. “As bad as these?”

  Her ribs and abdomen were punctured and sliced. The skin was already mending with scar tissue, although her stitches bled where they had cut into the skin.