Laurie King - The God of the Hive

Holmes ran his hand over his hair, staring down at his half-conscious son. Without a word, he climbed up to have a word with Gordon.

“We need to keep the boat on a steady keel again for a while.”

“How long?”

“Half an hour, perhaps longer.”

“I did say we should stay in t’harbour.”

“I couldn’t risk it.”

“Well, if you’re thinking to anchor in a nice quiet bay, you picked the wrong coast of Scotland.”

“Short of a bay, can you give us calm?”

“If I keep heading before the wind.”

“Do that, then.”

“You do know the farther out I go, the harder it will be to beat our way back?”

“Can’t be helped.”

“You’ll buy me half a boat by the time you’re finished,” Gordon grumbled.

“I’ll buy you the whole boat if you get us out of this in one piece.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

Holmes helped Gordon adjust the sails, then lingered on deck as the boat settled into its new course. He rested his eyes on the Scottish coast-line, directly astern now and fast retreating. If Russell-

No. He turned his back on the land and on problems beyond his control. Brothers was dead, Russell was in no danger, and the rest was travail and vexation of spirit.

With the change in direction, the boat’s troubled passage was replaced by an easy roll. Down below, he raised an eyebrow at his captive. “Will that be sufficient?”

“What if I say no?”

“Then you’ll have to stand by and watch me do my best with your scalpel.”

She bent her head for a moment, judging the motions of the hull, then asked abruptly, “How did you know my name?”

“Your diploma is behind the desk in your surgery.”

“You have good eyes, if you saw the print from across the room.”

“I don’t miss much,” he agreed.

“And this is your son, and you don’t wish to come into contact with the police, yet you swear you have done nothing wrong.”

“Correct. On all three counts.”

The whole time, her concentration had been on the boat’s rhythm, and now her head dipped once in grudging approval. “I can manage, if it doesn’t get worse. Boil a kettle. And I’ll need clean towels, a better light, and a bowl. A well-scrubbed bowl.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and moved the kettle onto the stove, tossing more coal into its already glowing interior.

Her hands were small, but when Holmes watched them ease away the dried and clotted dressings, he found their strength and precision reassuring. Her fingertips marched a slow exploration of the patient’s side, lifting as Damian’s breath caught, then going on. When she sat back, Holmes spoke.

“Those two ribs are the reason I didn’t want to move him before the bullet was out.”

“A punctured lung is not a pretty thing,” she agreed. “However, I think they’re only cracked, not fully broken. Help me turn him so I can get at his back-I want to take care not to twist the ribs further.”

The bullet had ricocheted off stone before hitting flesh. Had it hit a few inches higher, it would have reached the heart or lungs, and Damian would be the one lying dead on the standing stones’ altar, not Brothers. Had it retained more of its initial energy, it would have smashed through the ribs into the heart or lungs, and they would have a three-and-a-half-year-old orphan on their hands. Instead, the bullet had burrowed a track between bone and skin until it was stopped by the powerful muscles attached to the shoulder-blade.

Dr Henning’s fingers delicately probed the clammy skin. “My hands are like ice,” she complained. “Could you slide the hatch shut, please?”

“Your patient is pathologically claustrophobic,” Holmes told her.

She looked down at the face that lay inches from her knees, then up to the hatch atop the companionway ladder, held open on the deck as it had been since leaving Orkney. “I don’t carry chloroform in my bag.”

“Not needed,” Damian replied, his voice gritty but firm.

“Very well, we’ll make do with morphia.”

“No!” both men said in the same instant. Her eyes went wide as she looked from Damian to Holmes.

“Drugs are not a good idea,” Holmes explained, in bland understatement.

“I see. So, no sedation, and I work with cold hands. Any other problems you’d like to tell me about? Haemophilia? Hydrophobia? St Vitus’ Dance?”

“Just the bullet,” he assured her. She shook her head, and went back to her examination.

At long last, the doctor was satisfied that she had all the evidence her fingers could give her. She arranged pillows and bed-clothes around her patient, shifting his limbs as impersonally as she would the settings on a tea-tray. Holmes went to check on the kettle.

“Have you studied the sorts of wounds received in war?” he asked over his shoulder. He knew that she had spent time nursing wounds, but not where.

“This is from a revolver, not a rifle or bayonet.”

Which response probably answered his question. “I was referring to the dangers of infection following a wound with a fragment of clothing in it.”

“This will be my first private case of a bullet wound,” she said, “but I worked as a VAD during the War. I have seen gas gangrene, yes.”

“You must have been fifteen years old.”

“Nineteen,” she said.

When the water had boiled and the bowls and implements were clean, Holmes carried them over to the impromptu operating theatre. Dr Henning scrubbed her hands, leaving them in the bowl to warm while Holmes climbed onto the bunk, arranging his legs on either side of his son’s torso. When he nodded his readiness, the deft hands dried themselves on a clean cloth and took up the scalpel, suspending it over the lump beneath Damian’s skin. The boat tipped and swayed, riding out a swell, and at the instant of equilibrium, the fingers flicked down to make a precise cut in the flesh. Damian bit back a whine, but the cut was made, and in moments she was easing the bullet out as Holmes locked the young man’s arching body into immobility. The fingers staunched the blood, then reached delicately down to retrieve a clot of threads that had ridden the bullet through the body. They looked at each other over the bloody scrap, and smiled.

Ten stitches, and four more to close the entrance wound in the front, then she was wrapping a length of gauze tight around Damian’s ribs. When they eased him flat again, he cautiously drew breath, and his mouth twitched with relief. He met her eyes. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” she said.

I may have wrapped my arms more tightly around the child, following the realisation of our pilot’s condition. I know I prayed.

We had been flying for a quarter hour or so when I became conscious that my lips were moving, and that the words they shaped were Hebrew: Yehi ratzon mil’fanecha , the prayer of the traveller begins. If it be Thy will, to lead us towards peace, to guide our footsteps in the way of peace, to have us reach our destination of peace . The repetition of shalom , meaning both peace and health, is said to calm the nerves. Mine could certainly use some calming.

But how had Brothers followed us? The man was a religious charlatan, not some master criminal with a platoon of armed men at his beck and call. Yes, he had Marcus Gunderson, but I’d questioned Gunderson myself, at the point of a knife, and there had been no indication that he was one of a platoon of Thugees.

Brothers’ mumbo-jumbo was the spiritual equivalent of eating an enemy’s heart. He believed that by spilling blood at carefully chosen places and times-lunar eclipse, summer solstice, meteor shower, today’s eclipse of the sun-he would absorb the loosed psychic energies of his victims. However, he appeared to have kept this aspect of his teaching to himself: I had seen no evidence that he used any of his Inner Circle in his quest to become a god; only Gunderson.