Chapter 9 — Lazaret

The next wounded person arrived before we had found anywhere useful for the ones already there.

The man with blood down one side of his tunic was still on the floor. Gina had the folded cloak pressed against his side. The woman with the wrapped forearm had been moved far enough from the manuscript for the next person to appear, and one of the people who had gone to her was kneeling beside her. The three who had followed were wherever someone had found room for them.

The new arrival took one step and nearly went down.

“I’ve got him,” I said.

I did not, really. Someone from the wall caught his other shoulder before he hit the floor, and between us we dragged him away from the manuscript.

“Not there,” Gina said without looking up. “Keep that clear.”

There was no good there. The nearest doorway already had people in it. A chair stood where his legs needed to go. I pushed it aside and almost backed into the man with the burned hand.

Another person appeared before we had finished lowering the first one.

Then another.

People who had been waiting for family started moving because they finally had to. Someone pulled a table farther against the wall. Someone else took the chair I had moved and carried it away without asking where it belonged.

Water arrived in cups and disappeared into hands almost immediately. Cloth moved the same way. I saw a folded strip pass through three people before it reached anyone who knew what to do with it.

The centre of the hall had been clear a few minutes ago. Now keeping enough floor open for the next arrival took someone watching it all the time.

Gina still had one hand pressed against the cloak at the first man’s side.

“If you can walk, get away from the manuscript,” she called. “If you’re waiting for someone, wait at the wall.”

A man near the shelves repeated it louder.

I was kneeling beside the latest arrival when a voice behind me said, “Keep pressure there. Do not lift it to look.”

A woman pushed past my shoulder. Her sleeves were rolled above her elbows. There was dirt across one cheek and old blood on the cuff of her tunic.

“You,” she said to someone behind us. “More cloth. Clean if you have it.”

She set two fingers against the wounded man’s neck, watched his face for a moment, and looked around the hall.

“Who is treating people?”

Nobody answered quickly enough.

“Then who is bringing them here?”

“They’re coming through the book,” Gina said.

The woman looked at the open manuscript.

“Can they stop?”

“Not from this side.”

“Then clear this space. Everyone who can walk moves. The ones who cannot go in that room. Not the corridor. I need the corridor.”

She was already turning back to the wounded man before she finished.

Gina looked at me.

“Eir.”

It was apparently enough of an answer.

Eir had come through among the wounded. She did not ask whether the Library belonged to me or how the book had brought her here. She asked for water, cloth, and somewhere to put a man whose breathing was getting worse.

We gave her what we had.

The room she chose was the nearest one with a door. It had a table, several chairs, and shelves with blank books. The chairs went against the wall. The table became a place to lay people down until it could not. After that, people were laid on blankets on the floor.

Eir moved from one person to another without ever seeming to move quickly. Her hands did. She sent a man with a cut over his eye back toward the wall after wrapping it. She stopped a woman from drinking too much water at once. She told me to hold a wounded boy still while she cleaned grit from his arm.

“Will he keep it?” I asked.

Eir glanced at the arm, then at the boy’s face. “If he stops trying to pull away.”

The boy heard her and froze, offended.

“Good,” Eir said. “That helps.”

She was with another patient when someone called her name from the doorway. A man had gone pale where he sat. Eir looked over once, told the person beside him how to keep him upright, and did not go immediately because the patient in front of her had begun bleeding again.

It took three people to move a stretcher past the doorway. They had carried it through the Library manuscript with a conscious man on it, then discovered that the stretcher did not make the next turn by itself. A chair had to be moved. Then another chair. One of the people waiting for family was standing in the way and did not notice until Gina put a hand on his elbow.

By the time the stretcher reached the room, the man Eir had told us to keep upright was sliding sideways in his chair.

“I need another healer,” Eir said.

“There are others coming,” Gina said.

“Then find them.”

Gina left at once.

I looked around the room. Water. Cloth. A pair of hands. A clear patch of floor. Each one had seemed like a thing the Library had until it was needed by five people at the same time.

The arrivals slowed. The people who could walk were sitting along the hall walls. Those who could not had taken the rooms nearest the entrance. The manuscript remained open on its table, and every time someone crossed there was a small pause while everyone nearest it made space.

Frigg came through late in the afternoon with two aides and a woman whose ankle had been wrapped in a strip torn from a cloak. She looked at the hall once before she asked where Eir was.

“That room,” Gina said.

Frigg nodded. “The approach outside is clear for now. I have left the people there with the order to send children and those who need help walking first, to keep the manuscript clear, and to change the roads when they have to. They do not need me standing over them to see a wall fall.”

Her eyes went briefly toward the shelves. The return book was somewhere among them. Neither of us said where.

“The room beside this one,” she said. “Who is using it?”

“No one,” I said.

“Then I am. Bring reports there. Anyone who arrives with news, send them to me after they have water.”

It was not a declaration. She moved a table, sent one aide for more chairs, and began asking the woman with the wrapped ankle where she had come from and when she had left it.

I found a table near the far side of the hall after someone stopped using it as a place to stack cups.

It was not private. A chair scraped behind me every few minutes. People passed with buckets or bundles. Once a child leaned on the edge of the table and watched me write until his mother called him away.

I started with a word that did not help.

“What are you making?” Eir asked the first time she stopped near me.

Her hands had been washed, but the red was still caught around one fingernail.

“A lazaret.”

She waited.

I had expected the word to mean something. It carried too much Earth with it, including an association I could not explain here without making it worse.

“A hospital,” I said. “For wounded people. Sick people too.”

“Make it with clean rooms,” Eir said. “And somewhere I can put a patient down without moving three others first.”

Then she was gone again.

I wrote reception. I wrote rooms for treatment, places where people could stay after the first thing had been done, space for recovery, supplies that did not run out as soon as someone asked for them.

Then I stopped over a sentence that promised care without saying what care was. It was the sort of sentence that sounded useful until I imagined somebody else deciding how to satisfy it. I crossed it out.

The replacement was longer and worse. It listed clean places to work, equipment that could be made ready, room to observe people who were not well enough to be forgotten, and people or things that could do the work of carrying, cleaning, preparing, and reporting without deciding what ought to be done.

Eir came back before I finished the paragraph.

“He is worse,” she said, pointing toward the treatment room. “I need him watched while I am with her.”

“I can watch him.”

“Can you tell me when he changes?”

I looked toward the doorway.

“Not always.”

“Then I need someone who can.”

She was already moving.

I added observation. I added a way for the person watching one patient to tell the healer working on another. The phrase made me write three more lines to avoid making it sound like the hospital itself would decide which patient mattered.

At some point, I wrote attendants.

The image that came to mind was stupidly specific. I did not want wounded people waking to a wall of metal with a face painted on it. I did not want a machine that looked as though it had been built to hold someone down.

So the attendants were human-shaped. Slight. Young women at a glance, more like quiet attendants than anything made for industry. They would not look strong until they had to be.

I wrote that they could lift people safely. That they could clean wounds, prepare equipment, take measurements, change dressings, carry messages inside the hospital, and show a healer how to use a device if asked. Then I wrote, several times in different ways, that they did not choose treatment.

I had to decide which work they could take on.

The next day, the Library was quieter for part of the morning. That did not mean the rooms had emptied. It meant fewer people were appearing at once. People who had arrived the night before were still waiting for news, still looking toward the manuscript when it opened for someone new.

Frigg’s room had acquired a second table and several stacks of tablets. She did not sit for long. A messenger who came through the Library manuscript gave her a report about a road, then another person contradicted part of it from a different direction. Frigg asked what each had seen for themselves and wrote down the place, not a conclusion.

When someone asked whether a group should be sent back toward a district, she asked whether they had a way to reach it. When the answer was no, she told them to find space for the people already there.

Eir had three other healers by then. I did not learn all their names. One was always carrying clean water. Another had begun sorting cloth into piles that made sense to him. Eir used the rooms more efficiently than I would have thought possible, which meant patients now lay in the corridor outside instead of inside it.

“You have people waiting in the wrong order,” I said when she stopped beside my table.

She looked at the hall. “Of course I do.”

“I mean—there should be a way to sort them when they arrive. Light, moderate, severe. Something like that.”

Eir looked past me at the boy by the wall. “He was talking when he came in. He is not waiting. The man with the cut hand can. Put the terms where they help people keep track until one of us sees them.”

She set the page down and went to the boy.

I changed it. The labels became a way for attendants to gather what a healer needed and to mark a patient as someone who should be seen soon.

There were other omissions. Infection had seemed like something that happened after a wound, somewhere later than the work in front of me. Then a woman began to cough in one of the crowded rooms and two people nearby moved away from her without being told. I added a separated place for patients who could not be mixed with everyone else.

One of the wounded men died during the second night.

He had been quiet for most of the evening. Eir checked him twice. The last time she stood beside him for a while after she had nothing left to do.

There was no place to take him. Not without carrying him past people who were trying to sleep and people who were waiting to hear whether their relatives had arrived.

I added a room for the dead. Storage. Identification. Time until burial could be possible again.

Afterward, I looked at the section I had written about patients who stayed. Families were sleeping in the Library rooms now. There were children. There would be women who needed care for reasons that had nothing to do with the fighting. I added a small maternity section. Clean rooms. Places for mothers and newborns. The words felt insufficient, but Eir had enough to do without me asking her to explain a subject I understood even less than surgery.

The same pages kept collecting things I had not meant to write about. A patient who had survived the first work still needed somewhere to lie while somebody looked at him again. A healer needed instruments clean before the next person arrived, not whenever there happened to be time. People who could not be put in the same room needed another place without turning the rest of the hospital into an argument about who belonged where.

I wrote rooms for operations because there were injuries I could not imagine being treated on a table between shelves. I wrote ordinary beds because not everyone who had been hurt would either die or walk straight back to the fight. I wrote places for people who needed watching more closely than that.

Eir passed my table with a basin in both hands.

“Do you need anything else?” I asked.

“Everything,” she said.

Then she saw what I had written.

“Make the clean things stay clean. Make the used things go away. Make it easy to find what I need before someone has bled through the floor.”

She kept walking.

I did. Not perfectly. I could name sterile storage, cleaning, and places for supplies. I could not name the systems behind them.

On the third day, a message arrived that made Frigg stop writing.

The man who brought it had a burned sleeve and could not say where the message had started. He had heard it from people withdrawing through a place that had already become impossible to use.

“The old room is lost,” he said.

Frigg asked only, “Can anyone use it?”

“Not safely.”

That was all he knew.

The rented room had been unsafe the day before. Now it was lost as a useful arrival place. The return book was still somewhere in the Library. Nothing in the report told us what would happen if someone used it. No one suggested trying.

Frigg sent the messenger to sit down and tell her which roads he had actually seen. Then she went back to the tablet in front of her.

I looked at my manuscript.

The manuscript had grown beyond rooms for the wounded. Before I finished, I made sure it had ordinary wards, clean storage, and diagnostic equipment.

For medicine, I wrote what I actually knew.

People could have allergies. A drug could be safe for one person and dangerous for another. The people arriving here were Aesir. I did not know how much difference that made.

I wanted a small test. Something that could take a little blood and tell a healer whether a medicine was likely to hurt the person in front of them.

It sounded almost embarrassingly simple once it was on the page.

I did not know how it would work.

By then, the public table had become a bad place to finish anything. A child had fallen asleep beside one of its legs. People had begun using the passage behind me as the shortest way to the water room. If someone came back through the return book, I did not want them appearing beside a chair, a queue, or a stretcher.

Gina helped me move the unfinished manuscript to an empty side room near the hall. It had a table that did not rock and enough floor space around it to keep clear. We left one part of the room open for the place my signature would make matter, and put the manuscript table away from it. There was room for people to approach the pages, room for a stretcher to turn, and room for people waiting without standing where someone might arrive.

“This is a lot of room for one book,” Gina said.

“It may be two directions.”

She looked toward the empty part of the floor, then back at the manuscript.

“Then keep both open.”

I wrote a return book inside the hospital before I finished, leading back to the Library point where I would sign the manuscript.

When I put my signature down, nothing changed in the room.

That was normal. Or it had become normal enough that I did not wait for a sign.

The manuscript stayed on the table. The clear floor remained clear.

I entered the hospital alone.

The first thing I noticed was the quiet.

There was a low sound from somewhere behind the walls, and lights that did not flicker. The room around me was larger than any Library room I had used. It had wide passages, doors marked with symbols I could not read, and a counter with no one standing behind it.

One of the doors opened.

A young woman stepped through. She wore plain pale clothing and had her hair tied back. For half a second, I thought she was another person who had been sent in before me.

“What do you need?” she asked.

“I need to find the return book.”

“The return volume is in the adjacent room.”

She turned and carried a folded wheeled bed out of the way with one hand. It looked light only because she made it look light.

The return book sat on a small table in the next room. It was plain. I did not touch the pages until I had looked back through the open doorway at the place I had entered.

Then I touched one.

The hospital vanished.

I was standing in the cleared Library side room again, a few steps from the manuscript table. Gina was outside the doorway with a cup in one hand. She did not spill it.

“Well?”

“It brought me back here.”

“Useful.”

I went through again. Gina and Eir followed separately after me.

Eir did not look at the lights for long. She walked to the nearest open room, looked at the wide bed inside, the counter, the basin, and the equipment set beside it.

“What is this for?” she asked, touching nothing.

The attendant answered from behind her. “It displays current patient measures and changes since the previous observation.”

Eir looked at it another moment. “Can it show me one person without showing me everyone else?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

She used the return book to go back to the Library. Gina stayed in the hospital hall, standing near the entrance as if she were already deciding where people would get stuck.

Eir returned first. “The next one is stable enough,” she said.

Not long afterward, a man appeared in the entrance space with one arm held against his ribs. He was pale but awake. Eir was waiting beside the wide bed.

The attendant moved in at once. It guided him down without pulling at the arm he was protecting. The bed took his weight. The attendant’s hands were narrow and ordinary-looking until it lifted his legs onto the mattress as if they weighed nothing.

Eir watched everything.

“What do you need?” she asked the man.

“To breathe without it catching.”

The attendant placed a flat device against his chest, then showed Eir a line of light and several marks.

“Tell me what this says,” Eir said.

The attendant named the measurements one at a time and explained only what the display meant. Eir asked it to show the change again. Then she examined the man herself, carefully, with one hand at his side.

“Can he have something for pain?” she asked.

“A compatibility sample is recommended before medication selection,” the attendant said.

A small device took a drop of blood from his finger. It took less time than I expected. A few moments later, the attendant gave Eir several names I did not recognize, then their effects in plain terms, what the test had found, and the risks it had detected for him. It gave the concentration, the tested range for him, and how each could be given.

Eir listened to the explanation.

“The first,” she said at last. “At the lower end of that range.”

The attendant prepared the dose and gave it as Eir watched.

He breathed more easily after a while. Eir had him watched. The attendant showed her how to call up the same display again. Eir checked it once more before she left the room.

The next wave arrived the following day.

It came in smaller groups at first. The Library helpers had learned where to stand. Nobody waited in front of the manuscript unless they were about to use it. People who could walk were directed toward the walls or the water. Stretchers went through the cleared corridor.

They carried, held, moved blankets, and called for a healer when someone could not be left alone. One of Eir’s healers checked the new arrivals just long enough to decide whether they needed work there, whether they could be moved, or whether they had a little time.

Those who could be transferred went to the side room one at a time. A man on a stretcher reached the Hospital manuscript with help, lifted one hand, and touched the page himself. The people carrying him did not follow until there was room to bring the next person forward.

Inside the hospital, the arrival space stayed clear because the attendants moved people away from it as soon as they could.

Eir was there most of the time now. One attendant remained near her while she worked. Others stayed in rooms with patients or moved between the beds. The attendant beside Eir did not speak unless it had something that could not wait.

“Third ward,” it said while Eir was binding a woman’s shoulder. “His pressure is falling.”

Eir looked up. “Give me the last two pressure readings.”

The attendant told her.

She finished the knot, gave the woman an instruction, and went.

The attendant beside her had already begun preparing what Eir had asked for before she moved away.

More patients arrived. One needed the medicine test before Eir would use the drug the attendants could provide. After she chose from the results, an attendant brought a small sealed dose from the pharmaceutical unit.

“Where did that come from?” I asked.

“The pharmaceutical unit prepared the selected dose,” it said.

I had written supplies that could be replenished. I had not written a place that made medicine.

I spent part of the wave in the Library and part of it in the hospital, usually where someone thought I could carry a chair or move a table. Frigg’s reports continued to accumulate in her Library room. The front remained beyond the manuscript and the stories people carried through it.

There was not enough room for everyone to sleep, and people still arrived looking for those they had left with. The old return point remained lost.

The Library corridors were no longer full of wounded.

An attendant took the next stretcher from the hospital arrival space. The arrival space cleared.

Another patient appeared almost at once.