Tales from Kalgachia - 2

In the four years since the Perfecti had made stand on - or rather in - the peaks around Mount Octavian, the settlement of Abrek, located in the gentler hills some distance to the northwest, had begun a gradual transition from an immense refugee camp to a proper town. At this particular point in time the population were evenly divided between settled families and itinerant incomers arriving daily from the impoverished Minarborian Shrublands, in varying states of volition from well-equipped gold prospectors to bonded labourers brought in by Laqkozaki raiding parties. Away in the higher mountains, the Council of Perfecti sought almost deperately to emulate the quiet competence of the Minarborian Shrubbery whose Second State Arbor had provided a ruthlessly efficient social safety net in its time. Those masses streaming into the mountains after the Shrubbery's withering had been raised to expect such comforts, and the Perfecti sought to reproduce the arrangement as best they could with a fraction of the resources. In this they had been proven at least partially successful, with word of their efforts going well enough around the lawless Shrublands that the steady stream of migrants continued unabated.

These herds of refugees were prepared to accept a dip in living standards in return for the main benefit of the Perfecti's protection - security. Quite aside from all the armed bandits and ideologues wreaking havoc in the distant Shrublands, the collapse of governance in Minarboria's Garden of Whisperwood had unleashed a veritable tidal wave of engineered fauna on its surrounding territories, chief among which was the notorious Tyrannocricetus aliger - the common hamster bred into a house-sized flying predator with armoured endoskeleton and permanent hormonal rage, which was a major problem even in the Shrubbery's heyday. At one time these beasts had spilled over the border into Shirerithian Mishalan, requiring the Minarborian military to launch a hasty containment operation at a great cost in blood and treasure before Shireroth used the creature's incursions as a handy pretext to make its own military lunge into Minarborian territory. Now the old containment boundary - known as the Roborovski Line - was a mere memory, with the hordes of T.aliger once more free to rampage about the land. Fortunately they had never established a presence in the mountains; their wings only functioned in the thick air of lower altitudes, and although entirely capable of hacking burrows into solid granite the beasts generally preferred to make their homes in softer soils to the south and east. Up in Kalgachia, if nothing else, harrassment by such engineered mutants remained at a minimum.

Not that this assuaged all the grievences of Vitaly Piron, a physician who had followed the great migration into Abrek with the unsentimental, reluctant altruism which was hardwired into his profession. All these people would need medical care, he had reasoned, so he would go along with them. Not because he felt sorry for them - in all reality he viewed his patients with a professional aloofness which, combined with the stresses of the job, manifested itself as gentle contempt - but somebody had to do it. He specialised in skin conditions, which was entirely useless up here; now most of his work concerned sprains and fractures, as thousands of refugees top-heavy with carried possessions stumbled over the unfamiliar scree slopes and craggy outcrops that characterised this land. The few other medical professionals he had bumped into were no better qualified, and together they embarked on a steep learning curve. If there were any trauma surgeons around, they were not in Abrek. Word had it that the Perfecti had mopped up such valuable individuals as training cadres. Here, instead of referring patients to surgery, Piron had to do the work himself - assisted only by a few untrained nurses and a dog-eared anatomy textbook. "If in doubt, amputate" was the new creed of his kind; master that procedure and the patient was at least spared a long gangrenous demise, which was just as well because there were no drugs to treat such things. Occasionally an official from the Kalgachi Directorate of Health and Public Walfare would show up and arrange for the delivery of a supply package; the last gift to Piron comprised mainly of seed potatoes and a nutritional handbook. The Perfecti, being subscribers to the alchemical art, drew no distinction between medicine and food and seemed to see a nutritional solution for everything. A prescient and useful approach, Piron thought, but of limited use when one's leg was rotting away. Still, he flicked through the handbook and made a point of monitoring his patients' diet. A reliance on locally grown produce was causing problems of its own, however; being in the mountainous spine of the Benacian continent, iodine was absent from the soil and Piron had already had a stream of malfunctioning thyroids to deal with. Some of the children were succumbing to full-blown cretinism, their necks deformed by swollen goitres. Iodine supplements had been sourced and would be arriving soon, the Directorate had informed Piron, but that had been a while ago. Still, he thought, it could have been worse; one of the settlements to the west of Abrek had succumbed to a full-blown typhus outbreak and was under quarantine. He did not envy the doctor responsible for that lot, if there even was one.

Having just relieved a man of his left foot with no anaesthetic, Piron sought to clear the ringing in his ears from the man's screams by taking a walk from the cobblestone cottage which served as his clinic. He headed up to a nearby ridge from which he could look down on all of Abrek, a carpet of tents interspersed with more cobblestone buildings. The small size of the latter structures belied the more extensive basements below, dug deep enough to strike rock which was then broken up and used to build on the surface. Piron's own extensive basement remained sufficiently cool to store corpses for several days before burial if the need arose. There were five of them down there right now, mostly people who had arrived without a family to bury them. A Credent of the Church of Kalgachia would periodically stop by to organise a modest funeral, burying all the accumulated dead in a single service. Piron always showed up for these ceremonies; sometimes as the only attendee apart from the Credent and a few conscripted gravediggers. Doctors bury their mistakes, as the old saying went, and Piron made a point of seeing all of his safely into the ground.

As he stood on the edge of a steep cliff face, watching the smoke rising from Abrek's innumerable chimneys, Piron wondered about all the other doctors he had graduated with. He remembered all their jolly faces as if it were yesterday, gathered at Hall of Prunings Medical Academy No. 22 in the Minarborian city of Novodolorsk to sing their graduation song:

"Now the time has come to take our flight,

Far beyond this nest we are to spread,
Landing onto rooftops far and wide,
Of wards and morgues and homes with their sick beds.

Brother, you'll remember what you learned,
That is sure enough, they taught us well,
But brother, don't forget the frowns upturned
The smiles and laughs between the lecture bells.

Sister, how we'll miss you when you're gone,
After we have parted ways for good,
Behind our eyes your face will still live on,
Behind our ears your voice will lift our mood.

Now the time has come to take our flight,
Far beyond this nest we are to roam,
Perhaps we'll meet again some day or night,

Reminded of this place we once called home."

Piron, for his part, remembered those days well - most vividly his pursuit of a young trainee midwife by the name of Ruth Berrisch, a generously proportioned girl of Ashkenatzi heritage with the dimpled cheeks, the big brown eyes, the capacious bust, the works. Piron had directed much flirtation at her under cover of jest; she had seen through his approach and subjected him to a steady stream of gentle but foul-mouthed rejections any time they came into contact. Piron could never tell if she was genuinely irritated by him or just playing hard to get, as she always delivered her acidic broadsides with a mischievous smile. If nothing else, she seemed flattered by the attention and had always tolerated Piron's deliberately cheesy chat-up lines with little more than casual suggestions that he eat his own excrement. They had gone their seperate ways after graduation and out of all his fellow students, he wondered about her fate the most. He had bumped into a few other graduates while working in Minarboria, others more recently on the march to Kalgachia, but none of them could enlighten him as to where Berrisch had ended up. These days he had mostly convinced himself that she had moved somewhere out west to be among her bagel-eating kind; more than likely with a marriage, half a dozen children and several kilos of extra weight on her by now. But he kept wondering all the same.

Turning, Piron noticed he was not alone on the craggy ridge. Four black mountain goats were making their way slowly toward him, grazing on the tufts of grass which sprang from the rock. Intelligent creatures, Piron had been told. Unfortunate, he thought, that his nutritional handbook overlooked this fact but spoke quite highly of their culinary applications. He found himself surprised that they had apprached this close to Abrek without being hunted by hungry locals or picked up by the local Laqkozaki for a game of Buzkashi - but here they were, browsing the ridge like their ancestors had done since the dawn of mammalian life. The larger one of the group noticed Piron looking at it, and lifted its thick horned head to look back. It was a placid-looking gaze, with the horizontal pupils of the creature's eyes suggesting an inquisitive squint. Rest a pair of spectacles on its nose, Piron throught, and the look would be complete. He chuckled a little as the image crossed his mind.

Piron's giggle did something to change the attitude of the goat, which suddenly stiffened its hind legs like a coiled spring and lowered its head. Piron's jolt of panic was useless; he had no time to dodge the animal as its black, shaggy-haired musculature came charging toward him. Like a perfect stun shot on a billard table, the impact brought the goat to a dead stop and catapulted Piron off the cliff edge, his body somersaulting in the air to show him the uneven ground rushing up from below.

Far enough to break bones, Piron thought, but not to burst internal organs. His further meditations on the subject were broken the heavy impact of the cliff face on the back of his head - but before the pain could come flooding in, another impact slammed up through his right leg followed by a second one to his head which knocked him instantly unconscious.

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

A dream. One of Piron's dead patients, trying to engage in casual conversation, who could not understand the whole "you're supposed to be dead" fuss that Piron was making. The patient knew he was dead but did not agree with the fact that this precluded movement and conversation. He denied being a lich or any other kind of undead entity. Suddenly he was gone, having melted away in a second. Now a voice was coming from somewhere. Piron could not understand what it was saying; he only heard fragments. But he recognised the voice as familiar from a long time ago, someone of middling acquaintance whom he liked. Then their identity came to him, and his eyes shot open. As quickly as he had been knocked out, he was fully awake.

He was on his own operating table, back at the cottage clinic. The blinding light in his face mixed disagreeably with the pain which stabbed through his head and leg. How had he got here? To his astonishment, the voice from the dream continued:

"Ugh, you're awake."

With some difficulty Piron turned his head to the source of the voice, and spoke in a feeble rasp.

"Ruth?"

"That's Berrisch to you, you slimy putz. Only my friends get to call me Ruth. You know that."

Piron's eyes widened, He could see little more than the dim outline of a surgical gown past the blinding light of the operating lamp, but that was enough. He'd memorised her every curve, and against his expectations she'd kept her shape. Then the incredible odds of their meeting occurred to him and he was struck with doubt. Maybe he was dead. Maybe this was some kind of afterlife. An underwhelming, cheap afterlife given to impure souls. It would explain his earlier conversation with a dead patient.

"Where am I?" he croaked.

"Shut up," said Berrisch. "I'm not done with the stitching." Piron saw her blurry form bringing a tray of instruments - Piron's own instruments - to the end of the table. She began thrusting a needle into his right shin, although its punctures were no more than dull pokes amid the blinding pain from whatever remained of his foot.

"Stop lifting your head!" she said. "Every time you do I get blood pissing out of this end. I can't see what I'm doing."

"You... operated?" said Piron. "But you're a midwife."

"And you're a dermatologist," Berrisch snapped back, "but it didn't stop you. I've been using your notes. The ones I could read in that stupid handwriting of yours, anyway."

Until now Piron had felt uncomfortably warm, but now his blood ran cold. He knew his notes focused on one particular procedure. "Oh no," he said, trying to look up again. He was met with a sigh of frustration and a hand shoving his head back down.

"I told you to stay down! Do I have to strap you to the table?"

"It's gone, isn't it," mumbled Piron. "My foot... it's gone."

"Of course it's gone," said Berrisch. "The bottom half of your shin telescoped in on itself. Totally shattered. I left a clean bit below the knee to strap a prosthetic on, so stop kvetching. I don't know what you expect, jumping off a cliff like that."

"You found me?"

"What? No, some goatherd found you. Said you were lucky he was there, he only passed that way to find four goats that he'd lost. He brought you back here and left you with that clueless assistant of yours... what's her name... Dizzy?"

"Daisy..."

"Whatever. She's useless. I sent her home."

"She only started working for me last week. And she's only twelve."

"What are you doing grooming twelve year olds, you creep? This isn't Stormark."

"She wanted to be a nurse," said Piron. "I wasn't going to turn her down, I need all the help I can get. AAAAGHH!" He winced as Berrisch's needle went a little too deep into his stump.

"Stop whinging," said Berrisch. "I've delivered healthy babies who cry less than you do."

Piron mused for a moment. "Not that I don't appreciate your help, Berrisch, but... how did you end up here?"

"I heard the mournful wail of my old unrequited love from far away, and was drawn to help out of my undying affection for him."

"I see your sarcasm is sharp as ever," said Piron. "But really, how did you-"

"The Directorate sent me. Said the birth rate around here is going stratospheric and they needed another midwife. So I get here. Day two, a shipment of supplies arrives. Five pack horses full of iodine supplements. They said there was a demand for iodine, but five pack horses full? It'll take me forever to get through all that. I don't know why they sent so much. Then one of my assistants said this clinic here was begging for the stuff, so I thought I'd be charitable and donate some. I roll up here with two of the pack horses, and what do I find? That Dizzy girl running around in hysterics, trying to rig up an intravenous drip of potato juice to revive your crippled ass. When I saw it was you I nearly walked out, but someone has to restore this place to sanity. You're lucky you caught me in a good mood."

"Berrisch," said Piron.

"What?"

"I've missed you."

Berrisch was silent as she applied the last stitch on the last fold of skin on Piron's stump. As she snipped off the excess thread and returned her instruments to the tray, she gave her reply:

"Shut up."