Nothing Sacred Part 12

"Did the Chinese kill them?"

"Nah, just didn't feed us enough-and there was that epidemic, remember. Them other folks been in the field so long their shots were worn out. We all got the s.h.i.ts and they died- me, I remember little things like shots so I just got the dysentery and I lived till the old lady come around. She's somethin', heh? Crazy as a bedbug but she's not mean like that young one. I don't know why they let her just pick people out to bring in here, but they do. She told me I told her what she needed to know while I was delirious and she was healin' me. I'm glad 'cause now that she caught me, I don't want that ol' gal throwin' me back 'less she could throw me clear to Mandalay and I imagine that pretty lady I was on my way to see there has clean forgot about poor old Doc by now."

After a moment he said, "I haven't minded it too much here except it's boring. It's not dirty like the other place and it's maybe a step up from cleanin' birds, but for some reason, people-not you, dollin', you done your share-but everybody else I mean, don't get real sick real often. I haul rocks good as the next fella but I'm better at medicine. The medical supplies from my kit are about gone now anyway, of course. You used up a lot of 'em, cher. Didn't settle down like the rest of us."

"I keep expecting things to get worse," I told him. "Or-I did. Any more though, I don't know. For draconian cruelty this is rather an uninspired bunch, don't you think?"

"What about those bruises on you when you miscarried?"

"I did that myself," I said shamefacedly. "Freaked out."

He shook his head once sharply, as if clearing his ears, "Well, that's what you said but we didn't believe you."

"True, I'm afraid. Of course, they were pretty nasty when I started screaming-came and tied me down and taped my mouth over."

"They do that. When I first come here, they knocked me around a little, trying to get me to tell 'em something they could use. When I started in to hollerin' though, they taped my mouth and I don't see how I was supposed to tell 'em anything. I figure they are still worried about the building caving in and figure screaming and such could knock something loose."

"A simple explanation would have sufficed," I said stiffly, but actually, it wouldn't have, since hysterics interfere with one's ability to be reasonable about things and anyhow, an explanation that the building actually was in danger of falling in on me would scarcely have been therapeutic.

Merridew groaned and Thibideaux bent over him, humming.

"What is it that you and the doctor hum to quiet him?" I asked.

"Well, I don't know about her, but I'm hummin' a little s.n.a.t.c.h of 'Jolie Blonde.' It was my mama's favorite c.o.o.n-a.s.s fais-dodo song and she set a lot of store by it, so I figure it's probably got as much power as the next thing," he admitted after a moment. "We got nothin' else to help him with right now, and these folks got different ways of curin' I haven't heard of before. If hummin' helps, I just hope the Colonel likes Cajun music."His humming was interrupted by a light scrabbling on the roof overhead, and a heart-rending yowl like the one I had heard in our cell. After a moment there was another, more unearthly than the first.

"Spooks?" Thibideaux asked, only half joking.

"You figure the monks they murdered to take over this place come back on the anniversary of their ma.s.sacre to haunt it or something?" I was jeering, but I was shivering while I did it.

He mulled that over for a moment. "Nah," he said, and whisked to the door, and lightly left and closed it behind him. I didn't hear his footsteps at all, but in another moment he ducked back in and gestured to me to follow. I did, as quietly as possible.

The mist had all blown away and the moon nestled in the cleft of the mountain, which glinted white and horned as the crown of Isis. I saw my way clearly and moved as noiselessly as I ever have, following Thibideaux. Despite the moonlight, the top of the infirmary lay in deep shadow cast by the canopy. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, Thibideaux put his finger to his lips and pointed to a rock on the top-a rock which wriggled, squirmed, and opened white sharp teeth to yowl again. Not ghosts.

Demons? The Tibetans at one time had been very big on demons, which may have explained the lack of guards rushing out to investigate. I leaned closer and saw that the rock was blurred and furry in outline.

Then another portion writhed and yowled, outlining ears and a muzzle and one foot, pawing at the moon.

Thibideaux had been quietly pulling off his pajama jacket and motioned me to do the same. I did, shivering in earnest now and feeling embarra.s.sed as well. The prison wardrobe didn't feature inst.i.tutional bra.s.sieres or even T-shirts and although I had seen women working barechested on the hill on warm days, that sort of National Geographic local color was their bag, not mine. As soon as I held the jacket in my hands, outspread like a matador's cape, Thibideaux nodded to me to emulate his movements and dove for the toothy pile in front of us. I dove too, and momentarily I even made contact with something, until it bounced in the air, taking me with it, and when the stony ground rared up to jar my teeth loose and bruise me from neck to kneecap, there was nothing underneath my shirt but rocks.

Thibideaux's training as a bird cleaner came in handy at catching other slippery things and as I raised my battered body from the ground, he knelt triumphantly, juggling a bulging pajama top. It churned from within, the whole thing alive, spitting, hissing, growling and yowling furiously, throwing claws and teeth out the openings of the shirt.

"Come on, baby lion," Thibideaux said to the squalling bag of spit and claws. "Ol' Doc's gon' be your daddy now."

I retrieved my pajama top and pulled it on, pulling the sleeves down over my hands as I helped him haul the cat down the little slope leading to the door of the infirmary. About that time, the guards showed up, Tsering, Samdup, and two others from the perimeter I hadn't noticed before.

"What is it? Shoot it!" one of the newcomers said.

"No," I said, since I didn't want them to do that, especially since Thibideaux and I were wrapped around it.

Thibideaux disregarded them entirely as I freed a hand to open the infirmary door while he carried the bundle inside and the guards crowded after.

"What is it?" Tsering asked."A demon," someone else said authoritatively.

"It's no demon, it's an orphan," Thibideaux said. "Somebody go get me a box to pin it in."

Samdup opened the door again and slipped out but Tsering raised a pistol and aimed it at the bundle howling b.l.o.o.d.y murder in Thibideaux's arms. "Are you nuts?" I screeched in English, because my brain wouldn't translate quickly enough to stop her. "You'll bring the house down for sure," and pointed at the ceiling. Someone swept her gun aside and someone else closed in on Thibideaux, trying to take the bundle away from him. Thibideaux, of course, didn't want to let go and the pajama shirt came loose and a flash of pale fur streaked away from them, straight toward the guards, jumped into the air, onto Merridew, up to the top of the cabinet where the few supplies were kept and back down the side, bounding from wall to wall, shedding fur and spraying spittle in its wake.

Like the players in some sort of pajamaed basketball team, we hopped stiff-legged from side to side, trying to corner the cub in the small room while it yowled, spat, and took warning swipes at us with claws splayed into ninja stars.

Its ears laid back and its eyes wide with anger and fear, the cub screamed at us and kept screaming until suddenly I was shoved aside by a plastic milk crate. Thibideaux took the crate and, with the rest of us as a human pen, cornered the cub and held it down. Paws shot out in all directions, teeth gnawed at the plastic, but the cat was trapped.

Tsering once more leveled her gun at it but the weapon was knocked aside and Dr. Terton stepped in front of her. As calmly as if she was waiting for a bus, the old woman stood between the gun and the cat, which was trapped under the milk crate by a lacerated and bleeding, but triumphant, Thibideaux.

Dr. Terton knelt about two feet from the crate and, as far as I could tell, simply looked at the embattled, spitting cat. I certainly didn't hear anything over the din the creature was making, but first one claw disengaged itself from the flesh of Thibideaux's b.l.o.o.d.y palm, then the teeth closed with a mere nip to the plastic cage rather than a snap, a second paw dislodged itself from trying to disembowel Thibideaux, and the other two withdrew into the cage, to join the body in a tight crouch. After a time, the ears rose to points, the tail slowed from a rapid jerk to a quiet question mark, and the great glittering eyes focused on the old woman, who was crooning to it, singing to it, like one of those snake charmers in the stories, except this was a cat. The animal's ears p.r.i.c.ked forward, to catch more of the croon, its pudgy, kittenish front paws slid forward and its chin settled onto them with almost a clump, the back legs sprawled out and the eyes closed. Still crooning, the old woman made an impatient gesture with her hand to Thibideaux indicating that he should stand away from the milk carton, which he did. She lifted the carton off the cub, scooped the cat into her arms and walked off with it.

"I was going to do that next," Thibideaux said. "What she did. It's an old animal-taming trick."

"Bulls.h.i.t," I said, and asked Tsering for water to wash his wounds, noticing as I lifted my hands again that trickles of blood were running down my own arms from my encounter with the cub's litter mate.

Tsering returned with a Russian-style helmet full of water, half of which sloshed out when she dropped it into my hands, made a sharp about-face, and left, barking after her for the others to follow.

"You think she's p.i.s.sed because we caught the cub?" I asked Thibideaux.

"Nah, she's just being hard-core again. I told you-"The doctor shoved open the door then and Thibideaux interrupted himself to ask, "What did you do with the cat?"

"I fed her," she said. "And put out food for her brother. I have her in a cell for now. Tomorrow I will set a trap for the other."

"Some high-cla.s.s camp we're in here, Vanachek, just us political prisoners and a stray cat or two-seriously, Doc, how did you do that? I heard of soothin' a critter down but never that fast."

"Was it hypnosis?" I asked.

"Of a sort," she said. "I believe you are familiar with the technique, Dr. Thibideaux?"

"Yes, ma'am. It's mostly thinking like an animal. But I'm not so almighty quick as you are and I thought I was one of the best..."

"Do not discommode yourself, my dear Thibideaux. The snow lion is the guardian beast of Tibet. I share with it an affinity which no outsider can hope to attain. I thought perhaps I might live without seeing such a creature again and yesterday, when Nyima precipitously shot the mother of the cubs, I mourned perhaps more profoundly, I admit, than I would have had the victim been your Colonel Merridew. But you have found the cubs and when the other is located, we shall protect them here, as we will the yaks and any other creatures who find their way to our valley."

"That's great," I said. "But what are you going to feed the cats? A child a day?"

"There are rodents in abundance," the old woman said, and added, with a rather gruesome twinkle, "and, of course, when our food has run out, there will be corpses to dispose of."

"You aren't expecting another pack train, then?"

"I didn't say that but we seem to have been forgotten, wouldn't you say?" Oddly, her tone was one of grim satisfaction and I thought, 'The old girl has flipped out, gone around the bend, her motherboard has bit off half a bite more than it can chew.'

"Ma'am, I've been thinkin'," Thibideaux said. "If we're all on our way out, don't you think maybe it's going to take more than one person doctorin' to make the end a little easier for everybody?"

"I didn't say we were in any such condition, Dr. Thibideaux, but your suggestion contains merit, nevertheless," she said after a deep search of his eyes with her own.

"Well, you know and I know I'm not a real doctor, with a license and a degree and all, but I've got a lot of experience and maybe you could sort of show me some things-"

"Do I understand that you are asking for instruction?"

"Well, yes, ma'am, you might put it that way ..."

"Then perhaps you will want to return for some sleep, Miss Vanachek? Dr. Thibideaux and I have much to discuss and you and Lobsang have important tasks in the morning which will require your alert attention."

Having had a great deal of experience at knowing when I was not wanted, I took the hint and left.

SCOUTING PARTY.

Another pack train, more of a scouting party this time, since they expected to be carrying nothing back, departed for the rendezvous point, taking with them the last of the yak meat. Only one cow, a heifer, and a bull remain and those are to be used for breeding stock, Wu says. We are still on half rations, although we prisoners continue to do pretty well with our vegetable supplements. The guards are so listless and tired they stay on the perimeter and sleep on the rock piles, when they're not too edgy to do so.

We're all edgy these days, as the war seems to be coming closer. Rumblings in the mountains echo back to us, sending rocks skittering and bouncing down the surrounding slopes. Thibideaux is among us very rarely. He spends all his time mixing salt water and sterilizing needles to inject the Colonel with fluids. The Colonel remains comatose, though his lacerations and deep wounds, oddly enough, are healing very well.

The day was beautiful and clear this morning as I walked to the command bunker, and I was enjoying the sight of the crystalline mountains soaring above our greenery and rocks when the guards suddenly herded everyone back in from the field. I heard a distant whine, far softer than the buzz of a bee, and beyond the canopy, over the farthest slopes, a wink in the sky. We seldom see aircraft around here, and the guards, without knowing whose plane the visitor might be, did not want it to see us.

SCOUTING PARTY RETURNS.

The scouting party returned, as we thought, empty-handed, but the leader, one of the younger guards whose name I never caught, rushed right over to headquarters and was closeted with Wu and Terton most of the morning, as I know because every time I pa.s.sed Wu's door it was closed.

DAY AFTER SCOUTING PARTY RETURNED.

Lobsang was in the library, bent over the computer when I arrived. I was halfway across the room before he heard me, and he punched two b.u.t.tons. His expression changed subtly too, from studied, grave concentration to his goofy engineer stance, and he made a little show of scratching his temple and scribbling notes and said, "Ah, Viv, I am finding something of plumb perplexity here that we should be discussing-"

"Really?"

"Yes, I am. You see here?" he pointed to something on the screen. He was in the Earl Grey program again, the screen split in half, showing rubble with a strange, semicircular s.p.a.ce on one side and a long corridor with a b.u.mp in the middle on the other. "This is new area we are going to uncover. I am thinking that with these airplanes so near, and maybe bombings, we should be making stronger our underground so they are not collapsing again, you see?"

I nodded. "I'd see better if we could go back to the original avalanche, I think. Show me those pictures and when you first started restorations. All of the rooms." I thought I could get him to see the seed room, the storage rooms, and maybe point them out that way, but the rooms weren't labeled in the original structure, except generally as "storage cells and extra accommodation." Tea breezed right by them and I couldn't quite locate the one I knew contained the seeds. It was identical with the otherrooms on that level, so much so that on two of my initial forays to that room, I'd had to open a few other doors before I located the seed room.

But Tea was flipping past, to the pictures of the first parties of prisoners arriving on the slope where the camp now stood. In the pictures there was nothing but devastation-and this time I recognized Danielson, Tea, Dolma, Tsering, Samdup and Wu, all looking very much then as they do now, though it seemed to me Danielson looked considerably older in the picture than he does now-probably, I thought, because of what he endured in that previous, crueler camp.

"You must have been working pretty fast on getting this reconstruction project going," I ventured, watching him out of the corner of my eye. His face didn't exactly close off in that hostile way some people's do when they don't want to tell you something. He just very carefully pulled down the shutters and allowed only the merest glimmer of something that could have been amus.e.m.e.nt to peek out at me. "I mean," I said, "at the rate we've been going I'd think this had taken years and"-the headache pounced with a vengeance and I leaned back and rubbed my neck and temples-"and n.o.body looks much older."

"Some spa, eh, Viva?" he said, fobbing me off with a joke, and I didn't press further. But it's perplexing. The men have told me that they've been here a very long time and have been busting rocks almost as long as they can remember. Of course, I realize a little rock busting can go a long way. Right then I couldn't concentrate on it any longer because of the headache, which I still have twinges of, even now, it's so ferocious.

Finally, I saw an opportunity and said, "I think we should carefully check every single room in the lower excavations, one by one, move stuff away from the walls, starting in that storage area, perhaps, until we see all the weaknesses and strengths and, incidentally, any important artifacts that we may have overlooked."

"Yes," he said, nodding in a measured way. "Yes, I see the value of this. I am now finding us helmets and flashlights and will be meeting you back here p.r.o.nto."

As soon as he was gone I punched up Earl Grey but the headache and the graininess of the early vid-film convinced me that while my earlier perception was correct, I couldn't find out more at present. I tapped Darjeeling again and, pa.s.sing the Colonel for the time being, accessed Thibideaux's Constant Comment file. The case history agreed with what he had told me, and the added press release said, "Today ... a veteran's hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and an orphanage in Calcutta were dedicated to the memory of Sgt. Henri Duchamps Thibideaux. Thibideaux, popularly believed by some Indians to be the reincarnation of the saintly Mother Teresa ..." I got no further than that because I was laughing too hard.

And something was flashing at the bottom of the screen. "Current Bulletin," it said. I wished to G.o.d they hadn't blacked out the date.

The Liberated Lebanon Government today in Beirutdeclined the offer of the North American Continental Allied Forces to aid them in their struggle against the rival United Lebanese Government. The LLG, which announced last week that it had successfully acquired a major nuclear device, said that it saw NACAF's simultaneous offer to aid the ULG as a conflict of interests. Prime Minister Chaya Rabinowitz of Israel and the Ayatolla Mohammed of Iraniaq have pledged to "fight fire with fire." NACAF has called an emergency meeting of all allied nations to discuss trade embargoes and other peaceful means of controlling the situation.

Looks like everybody out there is still at the same little games, only now there are new players NACAF hasn't figured out how to control yet. I can't get too worked up about this, as long as it's been going on, but neither could I suppress a flutter of pure panic as I read. The people of Lebanon haven't known peace since before my grandparents' time. Many of them, like the Iraniaquis, believe that if they die in battle they go straight to heaven. They don't seem very likely to restrain themselves for fear of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up somebody else's lifestyle.

Even without the date, this had to be new information. Maybe the supply chopper had dropped something after all. Maybe this was what Wu and the scout team had been conferring about and it had been put into the computer for Tea-and me?- and the others to see and ponder.

I pondered so hard that I didn't hear Tea reenter the library. Fortunately, he didn't come right up to the table again, but waited in the doorway. I punched back to Earl Grey and off.

"Just checking that storage area again," I told him, knowing, even then, that he knew I was lying, and I knew that he was, if not lying, definitely hiding something-though how much I couldn't tell. "I guess I'm ready now."

I decided to end the game as soon as possible, especially since I had suggested time-consumingly thorough searches of all the rooms. I took him straight to the seed room and beamed my flashlight directly on the Burpee packets.

Tea shone his own light onto the ceiling and said, "These shorings-up are okay, all right."

And I said, enunciating carefully and with full emphasis and in loud ringing tones, "Oh! Look!

Seeds!"

He nodded and continued to check the ceiling corners. I put my hand on his arm, picked up a seed packet, and thrust it into his hand.

"Seeds," I said. "You know. For growing plants."

"They are dehydrated?" he asked, his face still turned upward to the cobwebs. "You add water?"

"Yes, and sunlight and dirt."

"And what," he asked, veering the flashlight to the opposite corner, "are we wanting with more plants?"

"We are wanting to eat them," I said, almost yelling it.

"Ah," he said, and turned his face back toward me and I saw that he was grinning, had been grinning the whole time, probably. "Then it is grub you are finding, is it?"

"It is if we get it planted."

"Then we should be telling Commandant Wu of this ..." he prodded.

"I sort of thought maybe you could do it alone," I said. "Chain of command and all that and-uh, she doesn't like me much.""Also, maybe, the other prisoners might think you should have kept this secret for their sake?" The bright light of the work lamp in the hall cast shadows on his pitted face that made it look full of moon craters, but his eyes glittered with a combination of humor and anger and a complexity of other, subtler things- flickerings of thought and feeling I did not understand except that in that moment I understood that he had known all along. For his own reasons he had been waiting for me to make a point of it to him.

As I have previously had reason to note, while his goofiness is undoubtedly genuine, there is a great deal more to him than that.

Feeling foolish, I did not wish to pursue the subject further, but he said, "No, Viv, it is your claim, this. I will not accept credit, but will go with you to speak to my wife."

I held my hands tightly together to stop them shaking as we entered Wu's office, despite Tea's comforting presence. I was glad that he was there, even if he had set me up. I was afraid, however, that whatever other undiscovered strengths lurked as yet unexcavated beneath his craggy skin might not include the guts to stand up to his ferocious little wife and the willingness to do so on my behalf.

But there were other differences between this audience with La Wu and my previous ones. The guards on duty were Dolma, which explained her absence from the library this morning, and Tsering.

Tsering looked grumpy from loss of sleep but was painstakingly careful to look past and through me at all times. That rea.s.sured me. Before Merridew saved her daughter's life, Tsering used to glare menacingly and bounce her rifle in her palms. Not being looked at was a big improvement.

d.a.m.n Tea anyway. I had trusted him and he seemed very smug and unconcerned, though no less amiable to me than ever. I didn't understand why he hadn't followed my hints earlier and taken the credit for finding the seeds instead of, as I had thought he would, having to accept the blame for not discovering them earlier. The computer was on Wu's desk and she was tapping at it when we came in, and she took several more minutes with it as if she hadn't noticed us there all along.