"Alvin Maker 06 - The Crystal City 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Card Orson Scott)

"I'm no healer," said Alvin.
"I think what she got," said the girl, "is the yellow fever."
If anybody had thought nobody was paying attention to this conversation, they'd have got their wake-up when she said that. It was like every nose on every face was tied to a string that got pulled when she said "yellow fever."
"Did you say yellow fever?" asked an old woman.
The girl looked at her blankly.
"She did," said another woman. "Marie la Morte a dit."
"Dead Mary says her ma's got yellow fever!" called someone.
And now the strings were pulled in the opposite direction. Every head turned to face away from the girl-Dead Mary was her name, apparently-and then all the feet set to pumping and in a few minutes, Alvin, Arthur, and Dead Mary were the only humans near the fountain. Some folks quit the place so fast their jugs was left behind.
"I reckon nobody's going to steal these jars if we don't leave them here too long," said Alvin. "Let's go see your mother."
"They will be stole for sure," said Dead Mary.
"I'll stay and watch them," said Arthur Stuart.
"Sir and ma'am," said Alvin. "And never look a white person in the eye."
"When there's nobody around, can I just set here and pretend to be human?"
"Please yourself," said Alvin.
It took a while to get to Dead Mary's house. Down streets until they ran out of streets, and then along paths between shacks, and finally into swampy land till they came to a little shack on stilts. Skeeters were thick as smoke in some spots.
"How can you live with all these skeeters?" asked Alvin.
"I breathe them in and cough them out," said Dead Mary.
"How come they call you that?" asked Alvin. "Dead Mary, I mean."
"Marie la Morte? Cause I know when someone is sick before he know himself. And I know how the sickness will end."
"Am I sick?"
"Not yet, no," said the girl.
"What makes you think I can heal your mother?"
"She will die if somebody does not help, and the yellow fever, personne who live here knows how to cure it."
It took Alvin a moment to decide that the French word she said must mean nobody. "I don't know a thing about yellow fever."
"It's a terrible thing," said the girl. "Quick hot fever. Then freezing cold. My mother's eyes turn yellow. She screams with pain in her neck and shoulders and back. And then when she's not screaming, she looks sad."
"Yellow and fevery," said Alvin. "I reckon the name kind of says it all." Alvin knew better than to ask what caused the disease. The two leading theories about the cause of disease were punishment for sin and a curse from somebody you offended. Course, if either one was right, it was out of Alvin's league.
Alvin was a healer, of a kind-that was just natural for a maker, being sort of included in the knack. But what he was good at healing was broken bones and failing organs. A man tore a muscle or chopped his foot, and Alvin could heal him up good. Or if gangrene set in, Alvin could clean it out, make the good flesh get shut of the bad. With gangrene, too, he knew the pus was full of all kinds of little animals, and he knew which ones didn't belong in the body. But he couldn't do like he did with the water and just tell everything alive to break apart-that would kill the person right along with the sickness.
Diseases that made your nose or bowels run were hard to track down, and Alvin never knew whether they were serious or something that would just get better if you left it alone or slept a lot. The stuff that went on inside a living body was just too complicated, and most of the important things was way too small for Alvin to understand what all was going on.
If he was a real healer, he could have saved his newborn baby when it was born too young and couldn't breathe. But he just didn't understand what was going on inside the lungs. The baby was dead before he figured out a single thing.
"I'm not going to be able to do much good," said Alvin. "Healing sick folks is hard."
"I touch her lying on her bed, and I see nothing but she dead of yellow fever," said Dead Mary. "But I touch you by the fountain, I see my mother living."
"When did you touch me?" said Alvin. "You didn't touch me."
"I bump you when I draw water," she said. "I have to be sneaky. Personne lets me touch him now, if he sees me."
That was no surprise. Though Alvin figured it was better to know you're sick and dying in time to say good-bye to your loved ones. But folks always seemed to think that as long as they didn't know about something bad, it wasn't happening, so whoever told them actually caused it to be true.
Illness or adultery, Alvin figured ignorance worked about as well in both cases. Not knowing just meant it was going to get worse.
There was a plank leading from a hummock of dry land to the minuscule porch of the house, and Dead Mary fair to danced along it. Alvin couldn't quite manage that, as he looked down at the thick sucking mud under the plank. But the board didn't wobble much, and he made it into the house all right.
It stank inside, but not much worse than the swamp outside. The odor of decay was natural here. Still, it was worse around the woman's bed. Old woman, Alvin thought at first, the saddest looking woman he had ever seen. Then realized that she wasn't very old at all. She was ravaged by worse things than age.
"I'm glad she's sleeping," said Dead Mary. "Most times the pain does not let her sleep."
Alvin got his doodlebug inside her and found that her liver was half rotted away. Not to mention that blood was seeping everywhere inside her, pooling and rotting under the skin. She was close to death-could have died already, if she'd been willing to let go. Whatever she was holding on for, Alvin couldn't guess. Maybe love for this girl here. Maybe just a stubborn determination to fight till the last possible moment.
The cause of all this ruin was impossible for Alvin to find. Too small, or of a nature he didn't know how to recognize. But that didn't mean there was nothing he could do. The seeping blood-he could repair the blood vessels, clear away the pooling fluids. This sort of work, reconstructing injured bodies, he'd done that before and he knew how. He worked quickly, moved on, moved on. And soon he knew that he was well ahead of the disease, rebuilding faster than it could tear down.
Until at last he could get to work on the liver. Livers were mysterious things and all he could do was try to get the sick parts to look more like the healthy parts. And maybe that was enough, because soon enough the woman coughed-with strength now, not feebly-and then sat up. "J'ai soif," she said.
"She's thirsty," said the girl.
"Marie," the woman said, and then reached for her with a sob. "Ma Marie d'Espoir!"
Alvin had no idea what she was saying, but the embrace was plain enough, and so were the tears.
He walked to the doorway, leaving them their privacy. From the position of the sun, he'd been there an hour. A long time to leave Arthur Stuart alone by the well.
And these skeeters were bound to suck all the blood out of him and turn him into one big itch iffen he didn't get out of this place.
He was nearly to the end of the plank when he felt it tremble with someone else's feet. And then something hit him from behind and he was on the damp grassy mound with Dead Mary lying on top of him covering him with kisses.
"Vous avez sauvВ ma mere!" she cried. "You saved her, you saved her, vous Иtes un ange, vous Иtes un dieu!"
"Here now, let up, get off me, I'm a married man," said Alvin.
The girl got up. "I'm sorry, but I'm so full of joy."