“If I don’t do it,” Yusha replied in a harsh, broken voice, “we’ll kill them both. And what’s more, Zainab… I’m a doctor. I can’t let a man lose heart in the rain while he has a needle in his hand.”
They took the young man inside, a boy of only five years old, with a grayish face and a festering gunshot wound from a hunting accident on his thigh. The smell of gangrene filled the clean, herb-scented room, a fetid intrusion from the dying world.
Yusha worked in a feverish trance. I didn’t use the rudimentary tools of a village healer. I reached into a hidden compartment beneath the floorboards and pulled out a velvet roll containing silver instruments: scalpels that reflected the firelight with a lethal flash.
Zainab acted as his shadow. It wasn’t necessary to see the blood to know where to place the lance; Monitor the sound of the dripping liquid and the heat of the infection. Move with silent, evocative precision, deliver silk threads and boiled water before he even asks for it.
“—He moved closer to the lamp,” Yusha ordered, and was then corrected with a guilty rebuke. “Zainab, I need you to put your weight on his pressure point. Here.”
She guided her hand to the corner of the boy’s eye, where the femoral artery throbbed like a trapped bird. Pressing on it, the boy opened his eyes from the blow. He looked up, not at the doctor, but at Zainab.
“—An angel,” the boy cried, his voice heavy with delirium. “You’re… in the garden?”
“—It’s in the hands of fate,” Zainab replied gently.
As the first greyish light of relief from the contraventions filtered through, the baby’s fever eased. The inheritance was cleansed, the artery stitched up with the delicacy of a seashell. Yusha sat in a chair by the fireplace, his hands bruised, covered in the blood of his enemy’s son.
