Paolo Bacigalupi - The Drowned Cities

Doctor Mahfouz was gentle and calm in an argument, where most people went off and started shouting. He brought out the good. If it hadn’t been for him, Banyan Town would have run her off long ago. They might have let Mouse stay, even though he was a war maggot, too. But a castoff like her? No way. Not without the doctor talking words like charity and kindness and compassion .

Doctor Mahfouz liked to say that everyone wanted to be good. They just sometimes needed help finding their way to it. That was when he’d first taken her and Mouse in. He’d said it even as he was sprinkling sulfa powder over Mahlia’s bloody stump of a hand, like he couldn’t see what was happening right in front of him. The Drowned Cities were busy tearing themselves apart once again, but here the doctor was, still talking about how people wanted to be kind and good.

Mahlia and Mouse had just looked at each other, and didn’t say anything. If the doctor was fool enough to let them stay, he could babble whatever crazy talk he wanted.

Doctor Mahfouz gathered up Tani’s baby and poured it into the grieving grandfather’s arms.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Salvatore demanded. “I’m no woman. How will I feed it?”

“‘It’ is a ‘him,’ ” the doctor said. “Name him . Give your grandson a name. We’ll help you with the rest. You are not alone. None of us are alone.”

“Easy for you to say.” Salvatore’s gaze went to Mahlia again. “If she had two hands, you could have saved her.”

“Nothing could have saved Tani. We might wish otherwise, but the truth is that sometimes we are powerless.”

“I thought you knew all the peacekeeper medicine.”

“Knowing all and having the necessary tools are two different things. This is hardly a hospital. We make do with what we have, and none of that is Mahlia’s fault. Tani is the victim of many evils, but Mahlia is not the beginning of that chain, nor the end. I am responsible, if anyone is.”

“If your nurse had two hands, it would’ve helped,” Salvatore insisted.

Mahlia could feel the man’s gaze on her back as she dropped the last of the clamps and scalpels into Mahfouz’s bag. She’d have to boil everything when she got back to Mahfouz’s squat, but at least she could get out of here.

She snapped the bag closed, using the stump of her right hand to stabilize it while she worked the clasps with the fingers of her lucky left.

The bag’s leather was stamped with the Chinese characters of the peacekeeper hospital where Doctor Mahfouz had trained before the war started up again. . was an Accelerated Age word for the Drowned Cities . was for China . And she could pick out other characters as well: friendship and surgery , the character for courtyard .

Roughly translated, it meant “friendship hospital.” One of those places that the Chinese peacekeepers had created when they’d first shown up to try to stop the war. A place with sterile boiled sheets and good lighting and blood packs and saline for transfusions, and the thousand other things that a real doctor was supposed to have.

These days, their hospital was wherever Doctor Mahfouz set his medical bag, all that was left of the wonderful hospital that the Chinese had donated, except for a few rehydration packets still stamped with the words WITH WISHES FOR PEACE AND WELL-BEING FROM THE PEOPLE OF BEIJING.

Mahlia could imagine all those Chinese people in their far-off country donating to the war victims of the Drowned Cities. All of them rich enough to send things like rice and clothes and rehydration packets all the way over the pole on fast-sailing clipper ships. All of them rich enough to meddle where they didn’t belong.

Mahlia avoided looking at Tani as she got the medical bag closed. Sometimes, if there was a blanket, you could pull it over the body to make a shroud, but they’d used all the bedding for the new baby.

Mahlia wondered if she was supposed to feel something at seeing Tani’s corpse. She’d seen plenty of dead, but Tani was different. Her death was just bad luck. Not like most of the deaths she’d seen, where someone died because a soldier boy didn’t like the way you talked, or wanted something you had, or didn’t like the shape of your eyes.

The doctor interrupted her thoughts. “Mahlia, why don’t you take the baby over to Amaya’s house while I speak with Mr. Salvatore. She’ll be able to nurse the child.”

Mahlia eyed Salvatore uncertainly. The man looked like he wasn’t going to give the baby over. “I don’t think he wants me near.”

Doctor Mahfouz counseled Salvatore. “You’re distraught. Let Mahlia take the infant. At least for a little while. We still must arrange for your daughter. She’ll need your rites to send her on. I don’t know the Deepwater prayers.”

The man continued glaring at Mahlia, but some of the rage was draining away. Maybe later, he’d have some fight, but now, he was just sad.

“Here.” Mahlia inched forward and eased the baby from his hands, not looking him in the eye, not challenging him. When the baby was in her arms, she bundled it up. With a last glance back at the dead girl, Mahlia hustled the baby down through the trapdoor in the floor.

There was a whole crowd waiting below.

People backed away as Mahlia came down the bamboo ladder using her left hand to catch the rungs while she cradled the baby in her right arm. Minsok and Auntie Selima, and Reg and Tua and Betty Fan, Delilah and Bobby Cross, and a bunch more, all of them caught in the act of lingering, heads cocked up and listening to the tragedy taking place above.

“Tani’s dead,” Mahlia said as she reached the bottom of the ladder. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”

Everyone except Auntie Selima looked at her as if it were her fault. A ripple of warding went through the crowd, people touching blue glass Fates Eyes, or kissing green prayer beads, lots of motions to push off bad luck. Mahlia pretended she didn’t see. She folded a triangle of blanket over the infant’s face to shade it, and pushed through the crowd.

Out from under the squat, the sun glared down on her. Mahlia made her way down a weedy trail, heading for Amaya’s place. Crumbled buildings loomed on either side of her, cracked sentries robed in jungle growth. Trees sprouted from their crowns and kudzu draped over their slumped shoulders. Birds clustered in the heights, making mud nests, flying out of empty window eyes, chattering and fluttering, sending down droppings on the unwary.

From amongst the green and leafy faces, more people peered out, watching Mahlia pass, families who lived on the old buildings’ upper floors while they kept the ground for chickens and ducks and goats that ran wild during the day and were penned at night, keeping coywolv and panthers from getting at them.

All along the lower walls of the buildings, the tags and colors of various warlord factions were splashed, painted scrawls competing with one another—Army of God, Tulane Company, Freedom Militia—evidence of the armies that had controlled and taxed and recruited in Banyan Town over the years.

Mahlia didn’t like any of them, but then, since most soldier boys would kill her on sight, the feeling was mutual. But the villagers held on to the illusion that they could assuage the soldiers who warred around them, so they still hung the patriotic flags of whatever faction was currently in power, and hoped that it would be enough.