Spring 5

The body’s waters.

Such a clean and pretty phrase. A poetic phrase, perfect for a textbook. Neatly outlined muscles, neatly fanned nerves, neatly fanned blood vessels – an ordering of greater and lesser helpfully color-coded.

So unlike what Esmerelda Azure-touched the Maiden felt under her hands. Her patient’s actual body squirmed and shivered, pulsed and oozed, grumbled and wheezed. Even at rest, his muscles danced across a dozen disgusting processes, and his nerves warred in a confused jumble of waking and sleeping.

She could sense the mucus in his lungs; the last meal in his gut.

Sometimes the sheer enormity of it overwhelmed her.

“Maiden?” asked her attendant.

“I’m fine,” she answered.

“Why don’t we take a break?”

“How many people are in line today?” she asked in return.

There was always a line.

“We only have an hour left anyways,” her attendant answered, “and you look tired. Shouldn’t we rest a little before your lessons?”

“And what is the lesson today?” Esmie muttered, trying to focus.

She knew these symptoms; knew she had to find which of the squirming, squeezing, pulsing pipes full of a million tiny folded waters was the blockage…

But everything inside was always moving! Even when a man laid flat, drugged into slumber, the body had to flow! To cease those waters was death itself!

Her attendant clapped her hands. “Oh, how wonderful you should ask. Since the Spring has broken and the day grown warm, I thought we might walk the garden and have a flower naming contest! Would you like that, sweetie?”

Hands pressed to her patient’s chest, she twitched in annoyance.

Esmie could tell the homeland of her priestesses by the nicknames alone. Sweetie or honey or dear meant the north – Whistler or Moros or Ruhum. Sunshine or daisy or petal meant the Jungle. She had yet to have a Plateau attendant, and she sometimes toyed with requesting one of the few faithful from that region just to learn a few new ones.

“I know all the names of the flowers in the garden,” she answered. The blockage must be close to his heart.

“Even the ones from Deepbloom?”

“And the ones from the east.”

Her chest ached. Or rather, her patient’s chest ached, and she shared that pain. Like a lead stone against his beating heart.

A secret she kept to herself; her attendants would panic if they realized their precious Maiden drank so deeply of her patients’ ailments.

A chalice for the filling, she thought.

When her patients coughed, she bit her lip against the same. When they threw up, she fought her dinner. She asked the attendants to make sure her patients went to the bathroom before her ministrations because several times she had wet herself because of a ward.

Her attendants were very understanding.

Such a kind-hearted Maiden! Let us fetch you some fresh clothes!

“There!” she breathed, finally laying her hand upon the clogged artery. Its waters snapped and lashed, angry and pained, and she forced a deep breath against the same in her own breast.

One day, would she open the connection too wide? Drown in these waters with some unfortunate patient? Esmie had never told anyone, but she felt the snap in a man’s body when his soul broke free. The careening, sudden disorder of the waters – once orchestrated and now rippling outwards in growing disarray…

Mother gave you this power because she believed in you.

Carefully, she nudged the waters in the man’s artery. She encouraged the squirming vessel to remember its strength; she prodded the thick, slimy, offensive mass to unfold itself into tiny bits of debris no bigger than the little cups that carried a man’s breath.

The pain in her chest eased, and the man breathed easier.

“He is healed,” she stated, raising her hands and letting the stink of his body odor recede from her mind.

“Blessed be the Maiden!” her attendant sang.

Esmie slumped backwards, a touch dizzy, and considered her operating room while she waited for the patients to rotate.

Her first operating room had been pink and gay as a skip through a flower field. Her first patients had been only sick playmates or priestesses.

Took a good two years before they realized I was serious about this.

Another year after that to convince the priestesses to allow her to admit patients from the line outside…which currently stretched around the entire temple complex.

It always stretched around the entire temple complex.

Ali had suggested hiring doctors to tend to the patients as they waited for holy healing. Thus, by strange twist, the Maiden’s Line became one-part last resort of the dying and one part healthcare program.

At its end perched Esmie on a blue stool in a stark white room, shadowed by her attendants, her guards, and her doctors.

Said doctors were done for the day. They preferred difficult cases and rare diseases. How else would they author new papers?

“Your next patient,” her attendant nudged.

Esmie refocused on a young man now being helped into the examination chair. Though strong and handsome, his face was marred by horrific scars. Even from her stool, she felt little prickles and sizzles from his burned nerves.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Is this the Maiden?” he asked. “My most sincere apologies, I–”

“What happened?” she interrupted, scooting forward on her stool to touch his face.

On contact, her own face broke out into burning heat. Hells, the man is in constant pain!

Pressing her hands in, she turned the nerves off.

She felt a little proud of managing it so quickly these days.

Just a tiny bit like her Stormmother that could rewrite the flesh with a touch.

The man shivered and sagged. “A-ah, my…uh…what was I…”

“Tell me what happened,” she urged. The story was simply to distract his focus while she dove into the wreckage of his waters.

Her own sight dimmed and then departed, leaving her in darkness.

He made it this far. You can too, she reminded herself.

“So much scar tissue,” Esmie muttered, hands roving up and down his skull.

“Your touch is very…” the man hesitated, unsure how to address a girl barely grown with her fingers pressed into the ruined hollow of his eye sockets. “…firm.”

“Pus coming,” she warned her attendants. “A lot of it.”

What followed was quite gross.

The man almost vomited, which made her almost vomit, and they both needed a few moments to breathe and recover.

Then she dove into rebuilding his face.

Eyes were difficult. Such precision! Even small deviations left the organ all but useless. In truth – another secret just for her – she simply nudged the pupil, lens, cornea, and retina around by tiny degree until her own sight returned to its expected strength. A sympathetic fishing expedition!

Building from the nerve stumps forward, Esmie finished her work in fifteen minutes. As the man blinked his eyes for the first time in a year, she finished sculpting his scars into a statement.

Another suggestion from Ali: Leave a little bit of scar. Such helps a man remember the prices he has paid – both bravery and foolishness.

Esmie did not understand this sentiment at all, but men seemed to love it.

He touched the bridge of his nose in awe.

“Thank you.”

She smiled. “I’m here to help.”

Me and big sis both.

***

After the Maiden’s Line, she and her attendants indeed went for a lesson in the park.

After that, as the day wore on, she sat for a play about Novia in the grand amphitheater up-shell. Apparently, this production was so popular that Tura had already recorded a movie for it, and the moving picture reproduction would be the first such played at the new theater under construction over the bridge.

Ali would have a droll comment. Something like, ‘A play of a movie of a play. See how mankind establishes the ouroboros of fantasy.’

Except it was Spring now, and big sis was off on her patrols, so Esmie sat pretty and smiled for the play. As the representative of the divine, she would not be so crass as to yawn.

She really wanted to yawn.

After the play, she attended a dinner where the priestesses did all the talking. The Maiden was the blessed Storm-daughter, the heart of the nation, the beautiful flower at the center of Waves! One did not sully such divinity with the mere affairs of state!

The highlight of the dinner? A stray cat snuck in, and she fed it half her plate of fish. She cured its fleas and killed a variety of internal parasites while it chewed. By the time the priestesses noticed and shooed the creature away, it was healthy as a kitten.

“A nasty little creature,” a priestess muttered.

You should have seen what was in its bowels.

Poop and pee; snot and drool; smells and textures galore! These were facts of the body. Esmie sensed when her attendants were holding in gas that could clear a room; when they menstruated; when they returned from trysts with lovers. She could tell which lovers left their ladies sated and which left the ladies craving a more substantial meal.

How would you expect me to heal the inside of a body if I could not sense the waters within?!

As the procession marched home, she rode upon a palisade and nursed her true grievance.

The bias of vocabulary.

One of the surgeons operates so long he wets himself, and it is ‘dedication’. I do the same, and it is an ‘accident’. A patient presents to the doctor with ‘anterior tibial plateau fracture’. I arrive, and the attendants smile. ‘His knee is broken.’

Esmerelda had been practicing for longer than many of her doctors, but her work was always a miracle.

Yawning in full force now, Esmie returned to her own quarters. Though she commanded an entire wing of the complex, her own room was modest enough for a little divinity. Dominated by a plush, circular bed, it whispered with the breeze through massive windows that overlooked her private garden.

As always, she sensed the waters of her guards and their serpents on the rooftop above.

Sometimes she teased the serpents by tickling their waters. Like her, they resonated with those waters, and she could affect a serpent at surprising distance.

Of course, turns out they can do the same to me. The elemental serpents were anti-god weaponry, after all!

The serpents had once retaliated by sharing with her the desire to swallow a plump mouse and sleep for a week straight, and she decided to tease a little less.

Flopping on her bed, Esmie sighed. “A long day, Mother!”

She looked forward to a quiet sleep and perhaps a pleasant dream.

Five seconds later, an attendant knocked and entered. “Maiden, forgive my trespass!”

Esmie shoved herself upright. “What’s wrong?”

“The boy from this morning is not stable…”

Apparently, her treatment from this morning had slipped. This was a grave concern; Esmie could sense most mistakes of the flesh. Everybody hosted a bevy of small mistakes, odd bumps, quirky tendons, abortive tumors, and other hidden maladies. These rarely caused a problem.

Rarely, however, she missed something important. If her patient’s waters degraded this fast, the matter could be dire.

She longed for Ali’s academic precision, but she lacked the terminology for better. The waters became unbalanced; they felt wrong; they wobbled like a young dancer on tiptoe. She knew how the waters felt when they were right, and she knew how they felt when they were wrong.

That just had to be enough.

“I’ll sleep with him tonight,” she instructed.

Rising, she crossed to a door joining her room to the next. Pushing it open with a foot, she entered a bright nursery. Sunshine, rainbows, and cheerful serpents covered the walls; plush carpets covered the stone floor; a large crib dominated the north wall; and a padded rocker provided somewhere for a parent to sleep.

Since her patient would be a minute, Esmie lowered the side on the crib, dumped a handful of blankets onto the pad, and dragged over an ottoman. Though the crib was large enough for both her and a little patient, she disliked bumping into the bars in the middle of the night. Instead, she pushed the ottoman against the crib and turned it into an extension of the pad.

As she finished that, a weeping mother and her toddler entered the nursery.

Of the two, the mother was harder to deal with. The toddler relented on sleeping in a crib as soon as she pointed out that she would be sleeping in it, too, and thus it could not be a baby bed. The mother, meanwhile, wailed as though her son had already passed.

Esmie’s servants interceded with the mother, and the Maiden examined the boy on the floor.

The morning’s concussion is well-healed. His heart beats strong, and his lungs breathe deep. What did I miss?

For a fraction of a moment, she sensed darkness in his waters…an evasive rot that knew the feel of her fingers and fled to hidden recesses…

But she sensed and destroyed the figment in the same moment, and the boy burped loudly.

What in the world was that?

The rot reminded her of miner’s lung – a combination of the slow choking of the waters by a thousand little fragments of poison and something deep and hateful. Ali had theorized that Esmie sensed the despair of a miner, killing the man as surely as the coal dust, but such a fate could hardly apply to a little boy!

“Where do you live?” she asked the mother.

“Iris, of course!” the woman answered, annoyed to be asked such an obvious question.

Esmie groaned internally. That explained the special treatment! Still, she asked the priestess to send a doctor to investigate for similar symptoms. Her duty as Maiden was to heal, and she took it seriously even when certain patients made her want to inflict a little harm.

The servants saw to the boy’s bedtime routine. Esmie helped, providing a nudge to fully empty his bladder before the servants diapered him. Enuresis lacked the force to cause her sympathetic issues, but she preferred to avoid the smell.

Poop and pee. Pus and bile. Mother, you are a thousand times over stronger and more sensitive than me. How did you walk this city without going mad?

Yawning once more, she returned to the nursery and flopped into the crib. She set a blanket against the north bars for a pillow, spread her legs across the ottoman, and settled in. A servant deposited the little boy in the crib beside her a moment later, and she laid a hand across his spine to keep an ear to his waters for the night.

No sign of that ichor now; just a bouncy baby boy excited by a new environment.

“Your crib is super big!” he giggled, having forgotten the argument from earlier about what constituted a baby bed.

She unfocused her eyes, taking in the swirling whispers of her temple.

“Feels rather small to me,” she murmured.

As the servants turned out the lights, the Maiden stared at the ceiling and wondered how much longer her life would continue like this.