The Memory of Water Page 3

  I got to work. It didn’t bother me, working alone. It wasn’t the first time I had whiled away the dark hours. There was always something else to do in the clinic, if one didn’t mind getting their hands dirty with duties that most London doctors would rightfully consider the province of orderlies and aides and cleaning staff. We didn’t run to such luxuries here. The few medical aides we’d ever managed to hold onto for more than a fortnight were assigned where they were most needed; in the surgery or, if they proved to have the aptitude, on nursing duties.

  I had learned how to clean bed pans, wash linens and sterilize instruments. I once made enough vegetarian stew to feed the entire ward, when our cook left her post without notice.

  I was peripherally aware of the sun rising beyond the tent, bringing in light and heat, for it was June and Toledo was torrid. Not long after sunrise, the protestors returned to their rope lines and began to chant. It was soft at first. I knew when the TV vans arrived, because the chanting and screaming grew louder.

  I absorbed the changing status of the camp subconsciously, for shortly before dawn, Schroeder grew agitated, forcing me to strap him down once more. He had already acquired the extra strength most of the Errata assumed, so it was trying work.

  Suzuki slipped into the room as I got the last strap adjusted and helped me run through the set of scans and tests we had chiseled into routine by sheer repetition.

  I read his temperature, my heart dropping. I didn’t say anything, because the four non-emergency patients lying on the camp beds beyond the plastic walls were now awake.

  Her big green eyes shifted to the monitor panel, then to me. Her expression was grave. But her shoulders gave a tiny lift that I easily interpreted. There’s nothing to be done about it.

  “Paracetamol.” I reached for the bottle on the trolley. At the very least, we could reduce a little of his pain.

  “He might become a siren,” Suzuki warned. Those who changed into sirens reacted badly to paracetamol.

  “He’s a goblyn,” I assured her.

  “And you know that, how?”

  “He reacted to the sunrise.” I injected a triple dose of paracetamol into his IV. Most human drugs had little effect on the Errata, even in doses that would knock an oxen off its feet.

  Schroeder was still squirming, although his vocal chords were shifting, so he no longer screamed.

  “Let’s turn him onto his side,” I said. “He’s trying to bring his knees up.”

  We got the straps undone once more and helped the semi-comatose man onto his side. His knees curled up and he hunched in on himself—all except his head, which rolled back, for his neck was stiffening.

  As he moved, the man’s skeletal structure gave out pops and groans. It was changing, too. I had speculated that the extreme fever the Errata suffered was the disease’s way of “baking” the changes into their DNA and making it express itself fully. World authorities had come to agree that substantially altered gene expression was the mechanism for the shift, which made sense to me.

  Sometimes I itched to have the time to contribute to the research myself. But I was too damned busy actually caring for the people the researchers merely speculated about.

  As we got Schroeder into the position he was naturally trying to bring himself into, he began to convulse. That was also par for the course. We held him down, while he jerked and shuddered, then swung into clean-up procedure once more.

  Before we had finished, he seized again.

  Suzuki stepped back and looked down at her white tunic, which was stained with urine now. She gave a soft hiss and stalked out of the room to find a fresh tunic.

  I kept on with the work of cleaning the man up once more. There was no one else to do it.

  When Suzuki returned, she wore faded surgery gear, which was too short for her long legs and too wide around her hips. She had used a surgical stapler on the tough cotton to fold the excess material in around her waist, because the drawstring was gone.

  Her expression was grim as we ran through another check of vitals. As I signed the sheet listing the grim facts, she said, “We’ll lose this one, Michael.”

  I shook my head. “There’s hope, yet. I might be wrong about him being a goblyn. If he’s becoming a dragon, then he can cope with even this fever.”

  “You’ve never yet been wrong about what they will become,” she pointed out, her tone reasonable. She resettled one of Schroeder’s arms, which had flailed about.

  “There’s still things we can do.”

  “There is,” she said firmly.

  I lowered the board. “There isn’t a scrap of proof that sucking up his exhaled air makes any difference at all.”

  “You know it does, Michael.” She maintained the reasonable tone, because we’d had this discussion before.

  “Inhaling bad humors is medieval,” I shot back. My anger was building and I tried to squash it, for this was Suzuki and she deserved far more from me than my intolerance.

  “So what? It works.”

  “For you it works. That isn’t science. It’s…”

  “Magic is just science you don’t understand.”

  “If it was a scientific concept, even one I couldn’t understand, then I should be able to replicate your results, but I cannot. Ergo—”

  “You are not fae.” Suzuki’s tone was flat. Pragmatic. “I am. It is a variable you always refuse to acknowledge—”

  “Because there is no proof!” I had showered her with anger after all. Well done, bastard.

  Suzuki didn’t react. We’d been here before, too.

  I shook my head once more. “We both know what is happening here.” I fought to keep my tone reasonable. For the sake of the Errata on the camp beds, I didn’t state what was happening aloud, but Suzuki’s tiny nod told me she knew it, too. Schroeder was dying and there was nothing modern medicine could do to help him. We couldn’t even ease his pain and make him comfortable.

  As doctors, our helplessness was maddening.

  When that happened, I got angry. Suzuki just grew thoughtful.

  She straightened out the new, fresh sheet beneath Schroeder, watching his labored panting. “There is one thing we might try.”

  “Something new?” I asked and hated the hopeful, childish upnote in my voice.

  Suzuki’s gaze met mine. “You won’t like it.”

  “I have liked very little for too many years. Tell me. I can stand it.”

  Suzuki was back to watching Schroeder. “There is a man I’ve heard of, here in Toledo. He has…skills.”

  “Skills like yours?” I asked sharply. I still wasn’t certain that the fae’s ability to draw out “bad air” from patients, heal minor complaints and ease major ones wasn’t merely a large-scale placebo effect. The lack of science to back up their abilities was a yawning black hole I didn’t like.

  That black hole of information hovered over all the Errata. Despite years of watching them, I was no closer to properly understanding their nature than I had been when the first Tutu victim had turned. All I had were precepts. Don’t give sirens paracetamol. Don’t give dragons or salamanders aspirin. It was pathetic.

  “Not skills like mine,” Suzuki replied. “Magorian is human. He has a way with herbs and—”

  “He’s a wiccan?” Horror burst through me.

  “He’s a healer,” Suzuki shot back. Her voice rose. “You are being obtuse, Michael.”

  That tone, those words…I had heard them almost daily, once. It was a reminder of Suzuki when she had been human and I had been terrified of her yet fascinated by such fierceness emerging from such a tiny body all at once.

  I felt nothing, now. “If I wanted a wiccan, I’d call my bloody aunt Suzy and tell her to bring her soothe stones.”

  “You don’t have an aunt Suzy.”

  “Now you’re precise.”

  “I’m always precise. You don’t give up on patients, Michael. You are relentless. Except you will not use all the tools you have within reach and that is…it is
irritating. And it is a crime. These people are dying and hurting!”

  “If science isn’t serving, I should have a bash at just anything?”

  Suzuki looked at me as though she was suppressing the need to box my ears. Then she drew herself up—and when she did that, she was taller than me. She raised her hands, palms up, looking eerily like paintings of Jesus ministering to the weak and needy.

  The air in the room shifted. A breeze whirled, fanning my face. The air, already heated by the morning sun, grew cooler as it played over my flesh.

  Schroeder gave a soft sound and his mouth opened. A sigh.

  On the monitor, his body temperature dropped a degree. Then another. Then three more.

  “Magic isn’t a sideshow,” Suzuki said. “It is as real as you and me. As real as that monitor.”

  “And if he is becoming a dragon, you’re endangering him, “ I pointed out coldly. “Science is real, too. Facts. Data. They’re undeniable.”

  The breeze halted and I felt a touch of regret. “Besides, you can’t keep that up forever,” I pointed out.

  “I cannot?” Suzuki asked coldly. “How would you know?”

  I didn’t know. That was the problem.

  Schroeder’s body temperature ticked up another degree.

  Suzuki tilted her head, as if to say “So?”

  I wanted to say no. Only, I couldn’t, because Suzuki is the most prosaic and practical person I’ve ever met.

  I met her when I was sixteen.

  The year I turned fourteen, I was put into the foster care system and shuffled to a family in Caernarvon. It was the first time I had travelled to northern Wales. It was my first time out of Carmarthen. It was a great many firsts, none of them pleasant, including the foster parents I had been assigned to. Any of them. I had four sets of parents in two years. The first time one of them got drunk and belligerent, I slid through the attic window, shinnied down the ivy and began walking. I walked in the direction I thought the train station lay.

  The police caught up with me barely two miles later. I was tall for sixteen, and when I couldn’t produce ID, they took me to the station to process me.

  I first tried to talk myself out of the situation. I’d learned how to make adults relax and laugh and lower their guard. A wide-eyed look, a precocious babble and the right words making the right suggestion at the right time. It came easily to me.

  But these were my first cops and I underestimated their stoicism. They were not impressed by a single word. That left only one recourse, in my estimation.

  I kicked, punched, slapped, scratched and bit. I surprised them enough that they had to work to try to contain me. That was when Suzuki sailed into the room, a cutter on calm waters.

  Back then, she had been only four foot, eleven and a half inches. “That half inch is very important to me,” she told me, days later. “It stops me from being an official midget.”

  She was a medical doctor, who had been treating a banged-up prisoner in the station’s inadequate infirmary, next door, and had been roused by the ruckus.

  Her lack of height and weight had not stopped her from stepping into the cauldron of violence and reaching for me, with a simple wooden ruler in her fist. She tapped the ruler against me.

  I found myself on my back, my head ringing and my legs numb and useless from the hips down, while the police officers gawped and got their breath back.

  I don’t know what Suzuki told the police, but I was released and she drove me back to the falling down cottage I was supposed to call home. She didn’t speak. Neither did I, not until she stopped the car beside the moss-covered stone wall.

  “But…you’re a doctor. You’re not supposed to be able to…to do that.”

  “Know many doctors, then, child?” Her stare really was inscrutable. Her eyes were narrow almonds, with dark irises filling the space.

  “Actually, I do. One at least.” I reined in the impulse to tell her about Dr. Garbo, in Carmarthen and what he had done for my mother.

  “Useless, then?” she asked.

  “Well, he helps people.”

  “So do I.”

  “When you’re not knocking them off their feet.”

  “I didn’t knock you off your feet, boy. Your legs did that for me.”

  My knees were still unsteady. “Teach me how you do that,” I said, my tone urgent. “Please.”

  She considered me. “So you can maybe take care of the people you ran away from tonight?”

  I saw her point. I shook my head. “No, not for that.”

  “You can see why I might think so. Tell me why, then, and I’ll consider it.”

  There were a dozen facile answers I could have given her. I dug deeper, knowing she would see through all of them. What emerged surprised even me. “If I could do what you can do…even just knowing I could do it if I wanted to, even if I don’t…then I would feel…safe.”

  She sighed. “The things we do to children.” Then she put the car in gear. “Segontiwm Football Club Pitch. The pavilion at the back. Tomorrow at four.”

  “Then you’ll teach me?”

  “It is time for you to get out of the car.”

  I opened the door and hung on to it. “How do I get there?”

  “Use your feet,” she replied. “But...if you run away again, if you ever use what I teach you against anyone who isn’t actively trying to kill you, then the lessons stop. You won’t ever see me again.”

  Suzuki taught me her unique blend of two different Japanese defense systems and a smattering of other defense principals for two years. But she gave me far more than a sense of control over my life. It was Suzuki who made me decide to be a doctor. Suzuki and Dr. Garbo, who had spotted my mother’s distress when no one else had noticed she was even in need.

  Suzuki didn’t laugh at me when I told her my new ambition, even though she knew—as I was to come to understand—that the odds against me reaching such vaunted heights, considering the basecamp I squatted in, were astronomical.

  My grades were bad and I had to make up the ground. I took extra-curricular classes in between casual work at the local chemist. Suzuki helped me catch up with other subjects and I paid for ad hoc examinations with the pittance I earned at the chemist store.

  I also managed to charm my high school headmaster into giving me a second chance at two of the subjects I’d failed at. I think it was the first time I ever used that ability to soothe people into an agreeable state of mind for what I considered to be a good cause, instead of avoiding trouble.

  I found a second job as an orderly at the local hospital where Suzuki had privileges. I suspect Suzuki had much to do with that appointment, although she denied it.

  Of the two jobs, I preferred the work in the chemist’s. I was fascinated by the precision work and the utterly reliable this-plus-that-equals-this miraculous substance. I didn’t understand for a great many years that I had been bitten by the science bug. All I knew was that chemicals didn’t hit back. They were predictable and orderly and they helped.

  A few weeks after starting there, Owen Davies, the chemist, let me help him in the pharmacy itself. The work was absorbing.

  When I filled in my submission for medical schools, I used my fifth option to request a pharmacy degree. As most medical student hopefuls do, I presumed that fifth option was the fallback option. The one that I didn’t really expect would ever eventuate. So that was the one I was offered, of course.

  I completed my science degree at Cardiff University, only a year behind most of the other students. I completed my pre-registration work in Carmarthen and got to know Dr. Garbo a lot better.

  I emerged as a fully-fledged pharmacist at twenty-four. But I didn’t apply to absolutely every position I could find, to see what stuck.

  Instead, I went back to Caernarfon and walked into the chemist shop where I had worked during high school. Owen Davies hired me on the spot, even though he didn’t need a second chemist.

  When I visited Suzuki, an hour later, she had alre
ady cleared out a bedroom in her house.

  I had come home.

  Suzuki’s pragmatism, her awe-inspiring ability to anticipate, and her empathy, which had not failed since the day I met her, despite the massive changes she had gone through, ran through my mind as she waited for my answer.

  I gave a great gusting sigh. “I don’t know if we should use your…talents,” I told her truthfully. “I just don’t know if I am capable of…of using…”

  “Magic. You may say it.”

  “No, I really don’t think I can,” I told her. “How do I know what is needed? What I can even use, or how it works? What if I do harm?”

  “What if, for once, you let go of the control buttons, Michael and let someone help you?”

  “I did, once.”

  “I remember,” she said softly. “But I’m talking about help from strangers. From people you don’t know and haven’t learned after far too many damned years to trust.”

  I had no answer to that.

  “Science—the science you know and understand—it isn’t helping, anymore,” she added. “It hasn’t for a while, but you’re a stubborn cuss.”

  Schroeder’s body temperature clicked up another degree. He was back to the same level of fever as before.

  “And Schroeder is running out of time,” Suzuki said, echoing my thoughts.

  “I will think it through, all right?” I said. “That’s the best I can do for now.” I plucked my shirt away from my chest. “I need a shower.” I headed for the zippered doorway.

  “Try food and sleep,” she called after me.

  “Yes, mother,” I said dryly.

  “That’s better.”

  She always managed to get in the last word. That hadn’t changed, either.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Outside, the heat was already ferocious. It would be another century day. I crossed the roughly circular clearing formed by a ragged ring of tents and shanties, that the camp residents called the “plaza”. In the center of the clearing, the World Tree climbed sixty feet into the air, the iron leaves at the top of the tree already shimmering with heat. The stylized, flat iron people coming together to hold up the metal canopy were rusty.