Arvid Chislenko cleaned his pince-nez and shook his head. “He’s not going to survive. Let’s move on.”
There were only a few new arrivals every day. A month ago, the elegantly vaulted receiving hall of the military hospital in Kubice had been full of bodies, and it had taken hours to determine who was treatable and who wasn’t, most no longer being within the reach of help by the time they’d got to them. With the liberation of Rajnowka had come the biggest surge, but now the casualties dribbled in, fewer in number and mostly diseases from the surrounding countryside: the various kinds of waterplague and gaol-fever, or cholera, typhoid and typhus to give them their proper, scientific names.
At the moment there were three needing attention, all delivered together, all wearing army uniforms with Krovot insignia.
“I feel a pulse,” his nurse insisted. She was attending to the only blond among them, ignoring the others, including one who was a little livelier, and one who was completely still.
“Of course you do, but it’s weak, no? It doesn’t look as if he’s going to make it. Let’s attend to the one who’s a little better.”
The body of the young man lay on the stretcher, twitching slightly. Emaciated and exhausted, his hair was matted and dirty, and his lips cracked. Indeed, Chislenko could see them pulse and quiver slightly, gasping for air, but he could also hear the throat constrict in a death rattle as his body’s functions seized up and shut down. Used to seeing the human organism as a machine, Chislenko knew this one was gasping and shuddering to a halt.
Rasa Maciulyté, on the other hand, obviously saw them as souls as only a village wisewoman could, and could barely let go of a single person until they really had ground their bodily gears into dust. He’d so far never been paired with her; she always went around on Motylecki’s shift, but the sudden sickness of another nurse had forced him to work with her. “I think he can survive, comrade doctor. Hurry.”
Chislenko took the “comrade” appellation with a twitch of his nose. He tried to find other ways of addressing people now. Despite having grown in sympathy towards the communists, these new terms stuck in his throat.
He picked up the man’s wrist, intending to demonstrate that her method of triage was faulty. There was barely any pulse. The heart was too feeble to make much difference. “Indeed. But listen to his throat, Sister Maciulyté. Those are the last few breaths he’ll ever take.”
“Don’t you think I know that? Back in the Cordon I heard it all the time.”
Rasa was a thick-set woman, in the fullness of middle age, a peasant and most likely a sorcerer, a dabbler in witchcraft. Chislenko’s assumption with most of the nurses was that prior to coming here, they had only received the most rudimentary medical training. It wouldn’t be her fault, of course. The Lenks of Kubice and Syevirmetyevo had been deported wholesale south-east, to the opposite end of the Empire in Galtargh after the First War and put to work in the colonies of which she spoke “developing the wilderness”. She might have been a young woman of twenty at the time of their expulsion, in the course of receiving some training at the hospital or in the art of a healer, but had her opportunities drastically reduced by deportation. Thousands had died in forced labour in penal settlements, but the survivors had gradually earned the right to a normal life, despite not being free to leave what was known as the Cordon until the end of the Empire ripped it down.
Meanwhile, every village, free and unfree, had its healer: its witch, shaman or druid depending on nationality. He wasn’t prejudiced against them; they did essential work among people who had had very little access to scientific medicine under the Empire. There would still be the need for men and women with healing hands; Chislenko was sceptical as to how the new Commonwealth was going to establish a health system for everyone, and, despite its terrible unreliability, he knew full well magic made it easier to control the spread of disease under normal circumstances. As a lisitsocheskiy, a worshipper of Lisak the Green, he even had no antipathy towards active sorcery like his Minervan compatriots.
But in a situation where they had to make snap decisions on whom to treat and whom to let slip into the Thrice Nine Kingdoms, this was holding up the good they could do for the other patients.
There wasn’t much hope for this man and his comrades, found after an outbreak of cholera in a village just outside the city. Tomorrow and the next day there might be no-one here needing admission, maybe just a few drunks having fallen in the street and requiring a few stitches, or a woman begging for milk for children who may or may not exist. Unlike the disastrous way it had started, the communists had managed the aftermath of the war fairly well. However, war always pushed people into towns, which posed significant public health dangers. Fair enough; Chislenko was the first person to admit that after the First War, the military had abandoned the civilians of the liberated cities while privileging the soldiers and army workers, and for two years afterwards dispossessed peasants had died in the streets and workhouses of Syevirmetyevo from diseases caused by public health being simply overwhelmed. Laws had eventually been passed to forcibly return them to the countryside, but the most tenacious had held on to city residence as long as possible and built slums and shanty towns to prolong their lucrative relationship with urban life.
The communists strictly forbade him to turn anyone away without at least an audience from a nurse, whether they needed bandages or food. It was forbidden for him to take any payment for his work, even in kind, since he was completely provided for by the hospital authorities. Surprisingly, this had not caused a stampede of beggars flocking inside the compound, a mile from the city centre, and he had relaxed his opposition to it before they ushered him out at gunpoint and put a more pliant physician in his place.
Like the believing communist Motylecki, for instance, his former pupil but now his master.
He considered the situation of two of the other victims, and found someone worth saving. The other was dead, and Chislenko sent an orderly for a priest who could read the last rites over the body as dictated in scripture; the chaplains were over-worked, but they admitted that the spirit could be sent on its way after a body’s death if there really was no ability to save someone. As he turned to the living man, the rattle of the man Rasa was attending to suddenly stopped. Chislenko dispatched the his patient with an orderly to the general sickness ward, and stepped back over to his stubborn assistant, expecting to have to order someone to wrap up two corpses.
The man with the blond hair mouthed his thanks and limply palmed the air. Rasa caught his wrist and gently put it down, back onto the stretcher. “No pawing. Save your energy,” she commanded. “You’re exhausted. You’ll live, but you’re terribly tired. Close those eyes of yours and we’ll get you into a proper bed.”
The patient groaned, a sigh that indicated his lungs were fully functional, and his body settled into its mechanical process again, lungs like the bellows of a factory furnace and heart like the ticking of a clock.
Nu bozhe Lisitsok, Chislenko scowled inwardly. Lisak in Heaven. Why him? Why not the other two?
“There you go,” she said with an indulgent smile. “In a moment or two, comrade Doctor Chislenko will get someone to find you a bed.”
“I’ll do it myself.”
Her reproachful gaze compelled him to start walking, but not so quickly as not to see what might happen next.
Maybe we got to that man first. Maybe it’s not resurrection – maybe she’s only able to revive someone from near death, and not bring someone back from Spirit. He’’d heard of the latter ability in some very holy men and women, but never in his lifetime of hospitals and healers seen it happen. He’d seen people healed of the most debilitating and damaging conditions, heard of a man with scorched lungs from a house fire relieved and then cured, but he thought back. Once the death rattle had begun, the reasonable thing to do was allow the person to slip away.
As he himself put the healthier survivor to bed on the ward, his fingers pulsed for a few minutes, itching to get on with their business of repairing the machinery of life elsewhere in the hospital.
