A Place To Bloom

Alarm

"Caleb, come here, please?" It was Dr. zʊɣi. She stood with three girls and an older woman—all of them the same dark-green skin—beside a stack of shelves where sheets were folded above an assortment of boxes and jars.

I couldn't get over her high, girlish voice. "Alright, listen. We don't know what's going on. We might get nothing, but we could get wounded. Everyone, this is Caleb; he's never dealt with combat medicine before." She turned to face me directly. "First, control the bleeding. Then, administer gebu'i. ʃamʊŋi, you're in charge of triage..."

A tall, lanky girl of perhaps thirteen wearing an undyed cotton loincloth nodded, then glanced me up and down with discerning yellow eyes.

zʊɣi continued, talking directly to Shamuni. "Caleb can handle bleeding, broken bones, most basic injuries, but if we need to pull an arrow, let me show him how to do it. Anything venom-related, go directly to pusumi as fast as you can. You got all that?"

Shamuni nodded.

zʊɣi then turned to the older woman, well into her sixties with a woven-hemp loincloth and sporting a white vita'o-claw tattoo on her shoulder. "tæ gʊyiŋɪði ʃa zaŋe ŋuve. zæto yuvʌwoxe. kʊde dowa meθizuse te'o ʃa ko'o ŋʌvɪsedu. pʊ zudase. goŋi vʌ gʊyiŋɪde ʃa samiði Caleb ŋuve."

With that, the older woman nodded and left down the hall towards the office.

zʊɣi then turned to the next girl, perhaps a year or two younger than Shamuni, wearing a dark-blue silk loincloth covered in silver embroidery of Uhuida writing decorated in spiral calligraphy. "Besami, you're in charge of nursing. Make sure everyone is comfortable."

The girl smiled and looked me up and down.

zʊɣi then crouched down low to talk to the third girl who couldn't have been more than six or seven. Unlike the rest of the natives, she sported dark-green hair the same color as her skin, and eyes of silver. "I'm depending on you to keep order. Anything out of place, anything that needs to be put away or cleaned up, you're the best there is. I also need you to keep an eye out for Caleb, and help him find anything he needs. Can you do that for me?"

The little girl nodded enthusiastically, then fixed her silver eyes on me with a gentle smile.

By that time, Geraln was asleep. A fly tried buzzing around his face until Chirpy snapped her long neck out and snatched it from the air. She gave it two good chews before swallowing and setting her head back down onto his chest.

The rush of men clamoring up to their defensive positions had died down to an eerie stillness. From the medical ward, all I could see were a handful of men some forty feet up, standing on the wall and facing outwards towards the main gate. I stepped through one of the archways that made up the north wall of the medical ward. Up on the wall, clusters of two or three men had gathered, while every now and then a man would walk between them.

What if it was Miyani? God, what if something happened to her?

My heart wretched. Images of her being carried in ripped through my mind, and my skin crawled. I tried desperately to shake it, but I couldn't stop seeing her. I broke. I shook my head and looked for anything that might distract me from those thoughts. Beside me was a fresh web with a spider the size of my palm working on a finger-sized lizard that fought hard against the fibers that ensnared it. The spider sunk its fangs into its belly, and the tiny lizard turned stiff. I watched as the spider waited a whole minute before wrapping up its prize in a cocoon of silk.

"Caleb, come over here."

I turned to Shamuni, the eldest of the three girls in the medical ward. She stood beside the sunken man I'd seen the other day. He was still gaunt, still weak, but his color had returned. I tried not to gawk. "What happened to him?"