snake. Hoping I didn't have any new cavities or canker sores I'd forgotten about, I bent over her leg and made like a vampire, sucking up mouthfuls of venom and blood and spitting it out again-sort of a reverse artificial respiration. It was a huge snake and there was a lot of venom. Even as I sucked I could see the blackness spreading through her pelvis, up her torso, toward her heart, down her knee.
I knew I was getting nowhere, and now the adrenaline was wearing off and I was feeling the effects of exhaustion, starvation, and exertion all at once. Helplessly I spread my hands along the perimeters of the spreading blackness of the venom, mumbling senselessly at it to stop, dammit. I was tired, muddy, and frustrated and about to lose this brave if somewhat screwy young girl in spite of everything. The venom on my tongue made it tingle, and I was starting to turn from her and try to wash my mouth out when I noticed that where the bright mauve of my aura touched the blackness, it gathered before my hands as if I were herding it. I stared at it stupidly, then ran my hands down her trunk, up her leg, and across her pelvis, as if I were sweeping the venom out of her system. Where I touched the black, it retreated before my palms, until it gathered at the wound and bubbled up out of it, like an artesian spring. When it was gone I kept staring at where it had been for a moment, then ran my hand across my tongue. A sheen of black appeared on my palm, and I wiped it off against the rice.
The girl lay still, panting, her eyes wide and her face still terrified.
'Ahn, tell her I think it's going to be all right,' I said, my tongue so thick I had to repeat it. 'Tell her I think the poison is gone.'
I hoped I wasn't raising false hopes. I hoped I wasn't hallucinating.
My head seemed too heavy to lift as I looked up at the faces around me: the girl herself, as pretty as Xinhdy had been, except for a gold tooth in the front of her mouth; the old man who had hacked the snake, most of his teeth gone; the children, wide-eyed and looking halfscared, half-excited. Finally the old man picked up the snake's head and the children followed, trying to lift portions of the body. When I got to my feet, the man shifted his grip farther back and tried to hand me the head. I declined, and emptied my breakfast of stewed monkey into the rice paddy. I hate snakes. I can't stand to look at them, much less touch them.
One of the girls helped the injured woman to her feet, while Ahn leaned on his stick and supervised. I felt the wounded girl flinch as I put my arm around her waist to support her on her injured side, but ainong us we got her back to the village. No mines, no booby traps. Just mud and rice and a concertina-wire barrier.
Later, four of the girls took a mat back out to the field and dragged home the snake's first victim. I watched mutely as they laid the body out. She was not as old as I thought, just very gray. Her face was purpled from suffocation and her body had been crushed, her features so ugly with her death that I had to look away. The injured girl cried out and argued at length with one of the women who was attending the body, but was finally persuaded to lie back. Her aura radiated grieving, a gray as cold and empty as a midwinter sky.
As they cleaned the body and arranged the features back to a semblance of normalcy before laying a banyan leaf across the face, it seemed to me that the dead woman looked nearly like the live one. No wonder the girl had been so ready to kill the snake.
Ahn wasn't allowed in while they dressed the corpse, and the injured woman looked at me, still angrily, as if I were committing a terrible breach of manners, but the truth was I didn't have the strength to drag myself out of there. I fell asleep while they were finishing the preparation of the corpse.
I awoke some time later to the groans of the girl beside me. She was on the mat and I lay beside her on the dirt floor. I was so stiff I could scarcely move, and it flashed across my mind that perhaps the snake had done me more damage than I realized.
But the girl's groan gave way to a sudden, panicky scream. I sat up and automatically reached for her pulse and stared at my watch, counting.
Her stomach was rolling beneath the light cotton of her pajama top, and she clutched it with both hands.
This time she looked at me entreatinGIy, 'Dau quadi,' she breathed. 'Dau quadi.'
She was aborting, of course. It was actually inevitable. Even if the venom had never crossed the placental membrane, being squeezed in the coils of a giant snake was bound to be damaging to any growing fetus. I stretched out to the door of the hut and yelled, to whom it might concern, 'La dai, la dai,' and hoped the urgency in my voice would make up for the lack of explanation.
It was almost over before anyone else could reach her. Blood and water gushed from between her thighs, soaking her pajamas and the mat before I could turn away from the door again. As the first village woman ducked into the house, the fetus, a very small fetus, delivered. It was not well developed. It could almost have been any sort of a baby creature, poor pathetic little thing. It hadn't had a chance. The women brought cloths and we wiped her clean and I wrapped the fetus in one.
She grabbed my wrist. She wanted to see it. I shook my head at first and she persisted, so I showed it to her. It helps sometimes when you know what you're mourning.
She began to cry, then to wall, and one of the other women touched me on the shoulder and nodded that I should leave the hut. I rose ponderously to my feet, feeling like an out-of-shape water buffalo behind the small lithe figure ahead of me. We hadn't far to go-just to a hut a few yards away, which was blessedly empty except for Ahn, who was tucking into a bowl of rice. He looked up long enough to nod at me and went back to eating.
The woman showed me a mat with a roll of cloth at the head for a pillow.
I sat down gratefully and started to go to sleep, but she sat on her heels and reached for my bootlaces, as if she thought she was my maid or something.
'No, no,' I said, and tried to wave her away. 'Ahn, please tell this woman I don't need a maid, just some sleep. She should get some sleep herself or she could lose her baby too.'
'I tell her, co, but she be mad-lose face.'
I compromised by sitting back up again and helping her take my boots off. A little girl brought me a rice bowl and a bottle of hot Pepsi, which I opened with the church key William had given me. She took the bottle from me and poured the Pepsi into a bowl.
The little girl put her hands together and backed off, leaving the Pepsi beside me. I put my hands together and bowed at her too. I was going to receive a crash course in Vietnamese customs, I supposed. But tired as I was, I was elated. William had been wrong and I was right. These people seemed no more threatening than my patients. I hadn't walked into the clutches of the enemy, I thought, just into a strenuous one-woman medcap mission, with a side dish of indigenous prehistoric wildlife.
Ahn stirred and coughed in his sleep. I felt his forehead. He was burning again. The rice and the Pepsi were something I wouldn't have touched ordinarily, but I had to have something in my stomach if I was going to renew my strength. As the food took effect, my perception of his aura deepened. Blackness spread from the stump up his leg. I was sure that if I disturbed him to do so, I'd find a knot in his groin.
Well, now that I'd gotten the hang of the old faith healer bit by trying it out on a perfect stranger, the amulet's power was bound to work on Ahn too. I spread my fingers so that each touched the end of one of the threads of infection and concentrated on thinking of the veins as being clean and clear, with nothing but healthy blood flowing through them.
The black threads knotted near the stump and, with a little urging, drained out the end. While I was working, the little girl was on the ball. She brought me water in what looked suspiciously like the same sort of basin we used for patients at the 83rd. I supposed it was just another of the instances of the black market moving in mysterious ways.
I went through the bowing routine again and smiled at her. The poor kid had fought that snake just as hard as I had and she must be just as tired. I unwrapped Ahn's stump and he woke up, hissing. My old fatigue shirt sleeve was thoroughly be-nastied.
I turned back to the little girl, who was sitting on her heels watching with the expression of a nursing instructor checking to see if I was doing everything right. Disinfectant was too much to hope for, but I made motions of pouring some over Ahn's wound and bandaging it up again.
My other fatigue shirt sleeve was grimy and slimy from the snake fight.
She dipped out of the house, and a few minutes later, an elderly man dipped back in and sat down on his heels. He was holding a bottle' from which he took a swig before handing it to me. It was Jim Beam. He passed it over, indicating that I should take a swig. I only pretended to, because the last thing I needed was a drink that would knock me on my can, and wiped off the bottle mouth before pouring a good inch of the stuff over Ahn's stump. He winced and hissed and started to cry.
The old man winced and hissed and started to cry when I poured his booze over Ahn's stump. I handed it back to him and made the steepled-hands bow again. I couldn't remember
