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Fiction
Speculative
“Follow me, and I will make you healers of men.”
Had he said this, the inhabitants of the land might have abandoned their superstitions and followed him away from the desert and into the country where so many people lay dying, and together he and they would have healed the sick.
But he was only a doctor and, he reckoned, a bad one, as attested by so many corpses that lay in the yard in the dust, under a halo of flies. A gate with metal spears closed off the yard and in it, among the bodies waiting to be buried, some barren bushes bowed, weighed down by thorns. Inside the clinic, dozens waited to die, and when they did, their bodies would also be stacked up like cordwood in the dusty yard to make room for more people waiting to die.
He had arrived in late spring, the start of heat. The heat made men hallucinate, and even he had seen visions and heard voices. The names of the villages bore the color and clangor of bronze, and when he heard them for the first time, he shut his eyes and saw prophets on mountains and hermits in caves. The desert was named Dust.
As dust filled his shoes, death did his days. Over time, he acquired an inventory of vivid mental snapshots: A withered woman whose arm dangled over the side of a bed, IV drip still uselessly inserted into it. A dying man’s final eruption of bloody vomit. A pocked peasant harrowed by sores that looked like an infestation of eyes.
An assistant, a native, told the doctor of a friend who had been born blind. “Still, he sees.”
“Sees what?”
“Golden thrones. Elders in white robes. A rainbow like an emerald. He says he looks forward to seeing this world, to find out how it compares with his.”
“What makes him think he’ll ever see this world?”
“He is convinced that someone will grant him sight. I told him about you, doctor, and he wants to meet you.”
“Why?
“He thinks you will grant him sight.”
“I don’t want to meet him.”
Cruelly, the disease dragged off only adults and especially the old, and thus it robbed the land of most of its elders and largely orphaned it, almost finishing what decades of civil war had started. There had been war and death, and now there was disease and death.
One orphan was a girl, eleven years old, sticklike and in rags. She lingered at the clinic, where people vaguely watched over her. Often, after the doctor had finished his rounds, he would see her staring at him from some mute corner, with the avid eyes of a dying sparrow. He would stroll over and give her candy or trinkets, and she would shyly thank him in her language, of which the doctor understood little. One time she told him her name, and he told her his. But then conversation stopped. Sometimes she would hang her head and fight back tears, and the doctor would wring his hands, feeling powerless and strangely guilty.
Dragons, Knights, & Angels ISSN 1558-9803
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