Telira cut her Renewal short, and came down out of the mountains to discover that a great army had passed. The homesteads and villages of the valley had been looted and burned, and the livestock that had not vanished had been slaughtered.

Squatting in the snow, staring down at a smoldering ranch from the concealment of a stand of stunted cedar and pine, Telira told herself she should have seen it coming. In the weeks prior to her retreat into Renewal, she had seen the subtle clues: strange, furtive riders coming in from the north to assess the landscape, far-off signal fires sending pale smoke high into the winter sky, unfamiliar sigils carved into the bark of trees that clutched at the rocky slopes of the Mogollon rim. All signs of a great army massing to the north. The School had taught her much more than Medicine. She had the skill to assay the shifting, fluid patterns of martial power in this battered land.

But she had been tired, tired almost to death. The thought of more war in this country had been too devastating to face, and she had retreated into the Renewal she had delayed for too long, fleeing to the highest mountains to cocoon herself in a cave of rock and repose. She might have told herself that war was coming, that she could do nothing to stop it, that she would need her strength to deal with the aftermath, but she had been too fatigued even to confront it in that manner. Her senses had informed her of all the subtle symptoms of impending violence, but her wearied brain had refused to assemble the diagnosis. In her absence, the disease had done its work, leaving her to contemplate the corpse.

She turned from the smoking homestead, and picked her way southwest through the mountain scrub. Fresh snowfall, though scant, had obliterated all but the grossest signs of the passing army, but it was clear that they had marched to the south. She had no reliable intelligence, but she assumed that James had arrived at last.

She stumbled through the snow, without direction, numbed by cold and despair. Her mind absently continued its analysis: James would march to the south, to meet the armies of Gutierrez outside the ruins of Phoenix.

When the full implications of that conclusion finally wormed their way into her awareness, she stopped, her jaw hanging. Her legs refused to hold her up. She sat in the snow, and wept.

Even when her tears had passed, she sat there, with her head in hands, wondering how she would survive the nightmare that was upon her. It would take her six days to hike to Phoenix, where she would find the unchanging face of battle’s aftermath. Memories of Gutierrez vanquishing the upstart Simon, three years past: shattered limbs, murdered children, infected wounds, sepsis, diphtheria, starvation. At least, this time, she would not have to face the destruction of her hospital--Gutierrez, distrustful of the Schooled, had forbidden its reconstruction.

She looked to the southeast, in the direction of the School. She felt an almost biological impulse to rise and head off in that direction, to the place of her safest, happiest memories, to a gentle world of books, knowledge, teaching and prayer. It would take her six to eight weeks to make her way to that hidden place at the edge of the sea, on the thinly populated southeastern coast of Texarkansas.

But that was not to be. One did not find Renewal in the shirking of duty. More than ever, that old lesson had been made clear to her. She stood and brushed the snow from her trousers, tightened the shoulder straps of her pack, and headed south, toward Phoenix.

The next day, she came upon the site of a small skirmish, many miles from the path of the main force. Two dead men lay face down in the snow, their gear identifying them as Gutierrez troops. Many yards away she found a survivor, slashed in the leg and belly, wearing livery unfamiliar to her. His shoulders, thighs and torso were protected by a curious armor, lamellar plates of cleverly woven wood, leather, and scrap iron.

She knew, almost as soon as she saw him, that he was dying. He was pale, his breath rapid and labored, his forehead beaded with sweat, his tunic stained heavily with blood. He sat with his back propped against a gnarled pine. When he saw her approach, he reached for his weapon, an ancient rifle that lay beside him in the crimson snow. He grimaced with the effort, and made a cry of pain, but his arm was rigid and contorted and would not obey him. It dropped into his lap, the fingers gnarling with spasm, and his chest heaved with the wasted effort.

She knelt beside him in the snow, setting his sword out of reach with discretion.

"Estoy medico," she told him. "¿ Como se llama usted?"

He looked at her, squinting, the muscles of his jaw quivering, bulging, his teeth clenched shut. He shook his head with great effort.

She nodded. She had grown accustomed to speaking in Spanish, but it seemed clear that this man did not understand her. She switched to the language of her birth.

"I’m a healer. I can help you. What is your name?"

He made an inarticulate, groaning sound between clenched teeth, something that sounded like "Stephen." The mere act of uttering it seemed to cost him tremendous effort.

"James," she asked. "King James?"

With difficulty, he nodded.

So it was James. James, the conqueror who had burst out of the mountains of Idaho to become, in less than five years, ruler of a vast territory that stretched from Oregon to Montana, from the Grand Tetons to the Grand Canyon, the self-proclaimed King of the Western Americas. James, the unstoppable, who had displaced countless petty barons and presidents and governors in his bid to build an empire all the way to Mexico. James, the enigma-- no waves of refugees had preceded his march to the south, and those who traveled into his realms did not return. But what was there to know? He was a conqueror, and she had seen the symptoms of that affliction.

She conducted a rapid physical, noting the rigidity of her patient’s muscles, the fever on his brow, his rapid, thready pulse. His eyes widened when she drew her blade from her hip, but he was incapable of fighting her, and his attention returned to the agony of breathing as she used it to slice open his trousers and examine his leg wound.

It was as bad as she had expected, and worse. The suppuration was massive, the infection spreading high into his thigh and beyond, into the pelvic cavity. The wound had interrupted blood flow to the lower part of the extremity, and the foot had already become gangrenous. This poor man, probably an elite scout, had "won" the skirmish with his two Gutierrez counterparts, but his wounds had probably condemned him to slow death. She examined his belly. A sword had passed through his flank, probably sparing the abdominal cavity proper, but that wound was also infected, and had bled massively before clotting off.

Beneath the blood caked on his flank Telira found a strange thing: an intricate, abstract pattern of interdigitating tattoos ascended each side of the soldier’s body, up the thighs and flanks, over the ribs and arms, up the neck to the jaw line. They were bizarre yet beautiful, and she had to force herself to look past them, to continue her examination. The more she saw, the worse his condition appeared, and she would need her wits if there was any hope of salvaging him.

He arched his back away from the tree, shrieking through clenched teeth, then fell back to his labored breathing.

Instinctively, she drew away, felt her skin prickle with dread. It was worse, still. The man’s twisted grimace did not rise from pain. His wounds had brought him death from tetanus.

She shuddered. Had she reached him a few days earlier, she might have been able to clean and debride his wounds and spare him. Now, the toxin had spread throughout his body, and he would die in tetany before he could escape into a more merciful death of wound sepsis.

She had not seen this often--less than a dozen cases, perhaps. In these brutal times, it was customary to take the head of a vanquished enemy, not only to please one’s lord, but also to show a manner of mercy. Here, in the mountains of the Mogollon Rim, Telira had taught her people the basics of wound care, and once they had overcome their suspicion of the Schooled and put her ministrations into practice, they had seen the wisdom of it.

So she had been spared an extensive experience of tetanus, but had seen enough to know the horror of it. She also had knowledge of its true nature--ancient books, safe within the armored walls of the School’s library, had spoken to her of the anaerobic bacillus, Clostridium tetani, of the toxin it produced, and--most wonderful of all--the conquest of tetanus by those of the Old World, of immunizations and immune globulins, of effective therapies for those fantastically rare cases that did come under the doctor’s care. In the Old World, death from wound tetanus had been virtually unknown.

But knowledge of a thing did not bring it into being. Telira carried no such wonders in her medicine pouch, and as long as the world remained distrustful of books and schools and machines, she never would.

Stephen--if she had heard his name correctly--had another spasm, the muscles of his back pulling his spine into an inhuman arch, and for a moment his head and his heels were the only part of his body touching the ground. Then he fell back, a cry of agony escaping from his throat. His breath came rapid and short, as he struggled against the rigid muscles of his own chest wall.

Opisthotonos, she told herself, retrieving the anguished word for this anguished posture from some long-past day in the School’s library. She chewed on her knuckles, watching him, torn by despair. She saw him look at her with pleading eyes, and her heart cried. She had knowledge, but knowledge was simply not enough. Was there nothing she could do for him?

She opened her medicine bag, examined its meager contents. It was late winter, and her pharmacy, culled almost entirely from local botanical sources, had grown sparse. She pulled out a tiny leather purse and a small vial of ancient blue glass. The purse contained a white powder, the boiled, pounded roots of stywood, a plant she found here in the mountains, which contained a curare-like substance. The vial held a pungent brown resin, opium cooked out of Mexican poppy. She had used them together, many times, for setting broken bones, wound care and minor surgery. Opium for pain, to drive the patient into the world of sleep; stywood to relax the muscles and render him motionless. Both dangerous, both invaluable in her skilled hands.

She looked at Stephen. The opium would help him--if she could get it into him. But the stywood--could she give enough to relieve his spasm without killing him? Yes, he would die anyway, but he must not die by her hand. The oath of Hippocrates had survived the world’s convulsion of fire and disease, preserved in the secret Schools scattered across the earth. She had taken that oath on a terrace of the School’s highest tower, overlooking the blue seas of the Gulf, a million years ago.

But she was also proscribed from allowing this man to suffer through her inaction.

With a tiny, spoon-like tool , she scooped up a small measure of the stywood powder. His jaws were clenched shut with more force than she could have hoped to overcome. Fortunately, like most people, Stephen had no concept of oral hygiene, and she was able to get the powder under his tongue through a large gap in his teeth. Then she made a fire, during which time Stephen’s muscles began to relax. When the fire was going, she removed a clay pipe from her pack and filled it with opium resin. She lit it and puffed, taking care to inhale as little of the narcotic as possible. When she had the resin burning well, she placed the bowl beneath his nostrils and blew into the stem, forcing the hypnotic vapor into his head. He seemed to understand what she was doing, and tried to inhale deeply, although the rigidity of his chest muscles hindered his efforts.

His eyes grew sleepy, and his limbs grew more relaxed, but his improvement was short-lived. Although they brought him less agony, his opisthotonic rigors came more frequently, and she repeated the stywood dose twice. With a snow-moistened rag, she cooled the fire in his forehead, and whispered to him in the soothing voice a mother uses with a sick child, telling him it would be alright, wondering if he understood her words or the lie they carried.

Darkness was falling when she gave him another bowl of opium resin, and a fourth dose of the stywood. The medicine had helped, but Clostridium tetani was winning; Stephen’s agony cut through the drugs to stare at her out his eyes. She had the horrible thought that she had made matters worse, doling out tiny measures of relief that could only be followed by still greater pain. To give him enough opium and stywood to let him sleep, she would have to kill him. Opium was a respiratory depressant, and the stywood, at a sufficiently high dose, would paralyze his diaphragm and chest muscles. Together, the two drugs could suffocate him.

Half-lidded eyes came wide open, and his back arched so high above the ground she thought he would break in two. His arms bent at the elbows, his hands forming claws at the center of his chest, like a mantis trying to tear out its own heart. A stifled, gurgling shriek wriggled out of his jaws, cut short in his throat as his back arched even higher. The fire cast convulsing shadows across his twisted shape, a shape no human body should have.

This spasm did not pass, and Telira cried out with despair. Weeping, she spooned a massive dose of the stywood under his tongue, then gave him opium smoke until the light of awareness in his eyes sputtered and failed. His back relaxed; upon palpating his spine, she felt bony irregularities there and knew he had crushed his own vertebrae. His spinal cord must have been destroyed, but that would not stop the spasm. The tetanus toxin worked at the level of the muscle, bypassing the nervous system. He was strong, and the nightmare might continue for many more hours.

She could not bear it. After he broke his own legs, she kept the opium and the stywood going at a steady rate, far more than her judgment or her oath allowed. When he passed an hour later, his limbs mercifully flaccid at last, she knew she had killed him.

* * *

The soldiers of King James all wore the bizarre, interlocked tattoos, like strange ivy trained to the contours of their bodies, but in all other respects they were much like Gutierrez’ men. Wary, efficient and formidable, they were quickly consolidating their domination of the area. James, like Gutierrez, had apparently learned the basics of dealing with a conquered population. For one thing, his commanders did not tolerate the rape or wanton murder of civilians, and summary execution of noncombatants was rare.

This was small comfort to Telira. The battle for Phoenix had raged for three days and nights, bloody and devastating. The troops of Emperor Gutierrez had abandoned their discipline in the face of James’ attack, committing a number of atrocities. These included the murder of Telira’s colleagues, Robert Sharton and Kalinda Tawn, the only other School-trained physicians in the entire region. Like her, they had had come in anticipation of the battle, arriving several days prior to the fighting to prepare for the aftermath. Gutierrez, ever distrustful of the Schooled, had ordered them impaled on stakes, accusing them of complicity with James.

Telira had been too busy to give them the mourning they deserved. Two days after battle, she had arrived to find things far worse than she had dared imagine: thousands of civilian and military casualties, almost no food or water, an epidemic of dysentery already stalking the dirt streets and smoldering hovels, and a population that shared Gutierrez’ distrust of a Schooled physician. She treated those who would let her to the extent she could, and swallowed her shame: shame for Stephen and the violation of her oath, shame for the limitations of her art and the inadequacies of her pharmacy, and shame for her own bloodlust, the persistent vision of Gutierrez and James impaled on royal stakes, side by side.

It was on the third day that they came for her: four grim, sunburned men in light body armor, mounted on tired, underfed horses, followed by a riderless fifth and a platoon of hard-faced, dusty foot soldiers. They found her tending to a broken leg in the makeshift field hospital she had set up: an open, tattered tent of ancient, moth-eaten canvas with a dirt floor and beds made of heaped rags or planks of wood. She had managed to enlist several of her more grateful patients as assistants, or as guards against those who would attack one of the Schooled or pilfer her meager supplies. But there was no resistance to be offered to these men. Telira and her staff watched silently as one of the riders dismounted and approached, looking straight at her. He was an ancient, stringy, grizzled man of Oriental stock, whose tattoos reached into his face, bizarre vines of ink curling around his weathered eyes and cheeks, like ivy on an ancient castle.

He stood at arm’s length, appraising her with steely, squinting eyes, and said, "You are the Schooled physician."

Telira nodded, rising from the bedside of her patient. "The one that’s left, yes."

"You will come with us."

She took a deep breath. "Why?"

The old man blinked at her, as if she made no sense. "Because you are commanded," he said.

"I serve those who come under my care. But no one commands me."

There was silence in the tiny, open tent. Telira’s assistants, and some of her patients, began to slink away from the smell of imminent violence.

"You are now a subject of His Majesty, King James of the Western Americas," the old man said, and Telira could see that he was struggling to be patient with her, even as his hand rested on the pommel of his sword. "I am his servant, and speak with his voice. Do not disobey."

The man on the cot reached up and grasped Telira’s hand. She looked down at him.

"You can’t help us if you’re dead," he said in Spanish. "Do as they say."

Of course he was correct. She knelt down next to him. "I’m sorry, Roberto," she said. "I’ll be back."

He smiled through his pain. "I know."

She called to her assistants, and one of the more courageous of her new friends, a gentle, clever teenage boy named Louis, came to her side. He kept his wary eyes on the old soldier’s sword as Telira gave him instructions. She made him repeat them back to her, and the grizzled warrior fidgeted impatiently as she corrected the youth and made certain he understood. Then she took up her medicine bag and followed the old man outside.

It had been years since she had mounted a horse, but the skill had not deserted her. She rode bareback, as her mount had not been provided a saddle, and she could feel the poor thing’s ribs rubbing at her legs. James’ soldiers also appeared to be poorly fed, and Telira wondered how long it would be before they began to steal what little food the civilians had to eat.

Three of her mounted guards were older men, their faces leathery and tan in the shadows of their helmets. At the head of the column rode a younger man, also sunburned but with taut skin and smooth cheeks. He was handsome and proud, but her trained eye noted the subtle signs of malnutrition in his features. Had James over-extended, reaching farther than his logistics could supply him? The thought frightened her, not out of any sympathy for the invader, but because such a weakness would invite a Gutierrez counterattack--more war, more pain, more death.

As they made their way in the general direction of the old city, he beckoned, a silent instruction to ride beside him. She saw the gray general glower at the young man with something like disapproval, but he kept his peace as she brought her horse to the fore.

After a long silence, he said, "My name is Eric."

"I am Telira."

He nodded, looking straight ahead, in the direction of the old city. "Where were you schooled?"

She looked at him. "In the east."

"There are perhaps a half-dozen Schools in the east, according to our best information. Which one?"

She sighed. "On the Gulf of Mexico. In Texarkansas."

"I don’t suppose there’s any way you could prove that?"

Telira grinned at the irony. "No. But usually, I’m at pains to lie, to convince people I’m not Schooled. My survival has depended on it, more than once."

He kicked at his horse, trying to speed up the pace. It was clear they were in a hurry, but the horses were weak and tired. The foot soldiers kept up a steady trot to the rear.

"Is it true," Eric asked, "that in the Old World, everyone was Schooled?"

"No," she said.

He looked at her. "Strange. I thought it was."

She shook her head. "No. In many parts of the world, people were unschooled. But in the Americas, most people were educated. School was a part of almost every citizen’s life."

"Do you know much of that time?" he asked, looking ahead again. He was trying to sound nonchalant, but she heard intense curiosity in his voice.

"Only what books tell us."

"Is it true, that men poisoned the entire earth with tiny machines, then fought over food by burning cities with the sun’s fire, and by spreading disease among each other, until almost none were left?"

Telira nodded. "Yes. It is true."

"Books tell you this?"

"Books. And other documents."

"But these books--they are a record of how men built the little machines that poisoned the world, of how they made new diseases, and fire that could fall from the sky to consume a million souls in the space of a heartbeat. Isn’t that true?"

"Yes, but..."

"So men are correct, are they not, to rid the world of this poison? To burn the books they find in the ruins of old cities, or buried in trunks, or hidden in the robes of the Schooled?"

Telira sighed. "What do you want from me, Eric? I carry no books."

He goaded his horse again. The foot soldiers struggled to keep up.

"My father was wounded in the battle. An arrow pierced his leg. The arrow was removed, but he has sickened. You will care for him."

"Your army doesn’t have its own physicians?"

He looked at her sharply. "We did. Fine ones, although there are no Schools where we come from. Several died en route to this horrible place. The last was killed in battle. You haven’t answered my question."

She looked away. "What question is that?"

"Are not men correct, when they destroy books?"

"Are they also correct," she flared, "when they live in ignorance, make war like the old ones, hunt and kill those who have been Schooled, impale them on stakes--"

The old general reached out from his saddle and grasped her arm with a powerful, sinewy claw. "You have been asked a question by the Crown Prince! You do not answer by interrogating him! You--"

"It’s all right, Toshiro," Eric said.

Toshiro released his painful grip, glowering at her like an old wolfhound. She looked at the young man. "Your father..."

"My father is James Patrick, your Lord and King," Eric said in a soft voice. "Shortly you will discover that he is the finest man you will ever know. As you are well aware, he had nothing to do with the death of your comrades. Now, answer the question, please."

She looked away, toward the burned shanties and the rubbled pueblos, at the huddled refugees and unburied corpses. Gutierrez had been a monster, but James’ arrival had brought even more anguish to this wretched place. She chewed her lip a moment, and when she had tamed the hatred from her voice, she said, "You know my answer, your highness. Books are repositories of wisdom and learning. They are the source of the knowledge you now enlist to save your father in his sickness. From them, we learn the triumphs and failings of those who came before. With them, we can re-create their victories and avoid their disasters. When men burn books, they throw wisdom and hope into the flames."

The Prince looked over his shoulder at General Toshiro.

The old man nodded. "She is Schooled."

She realized she had passed some manner of examination. They all fell silent as the party passed out of the settlement and came to the edge of the old inner city, a vast plain of rubble and ruin, truncated towers of steel and concrete in various stages of demolition. Telira realized, with a shock, that they were riding into the heart of this forbidden landscape, a place of danger and mystery, an artifact of the evil of the Old World. This place was held taboo on pain of death by those who lived in the shanties, hovels and great pueblo castles that had been built in the ashes of the Phoenician suburbs. Emperor Gutierrez, although by all accounts an intelligent man, had been especially paranoid in this regard--those caught foraging among the ruins had been routinely burned at the stake, or impaled.

"You make your headquarters in there?" she asked, incredulous.

The Prince looked at her from beneath his battered helmet, gave her a wry smile. "You’re educated. Wouldn’t you?"

That stopped her, made her think.

"We’re not the Gutierrez," he said. "We are different, in many ways."

But almost as he spoke the words, the party came upon a checkpoint, where a half dozen of James’ tattooed warriors stood guard at an ancient gate. This gate interrupted an old wall, remarkably intact, a footing of crumbled concrete that sprouted spear-tipped bars of rusted wrought iron. Perched on these pointed bars, extending for many yards in each direction, were hundreds of heads, staring out at the misery of the masses from the center of taboo. Each ruined face twisted in its own unique grimace, yet they all reminded her of Stephen’s death rigor.

She shuddered, and realized that the Prince was looking at her.

"Not so different," she told him.

The guards at the gate gave salute with their weapons, and Eric’s party passed.

"They were all warriors," he said, offering an embarrassed explanation. "No civilians. War means killing, and the taking of heads is an act of mercy."

She said nothing, feeling her blood chill as a cold madness took her. You know nothing of mercy, she told him silently. But I have learned a new way of mercy, from one of your own men.. Now I will take pity, Prince Eric, on those who suffer at the hands of conquerors. My oath lies broken in the mountains. With stywood and opium I will ease the torment of this land. Your father will not survive treatment.

* * *

James’ headquarters had been set up in a remarkably intact structure of steel and stone at the center of the old city. In the first wild decades after the war, before the taboos, it had been scavenged for glass, metal and whatever machines had once lay within. The low, squat structure of the building had given it some protection from the blast that had descended from the heavens, like a colossal foot, to crush the city. The stumps of shattered skyscrapers lay about the landscape, testaments to fallen pride.

At the entrance there had once been an atrium, very similar in design to the one that graced the School where Telira had been reared. It made her homesick, and its ruined condition--the glass ceiling had been shattered and open to the sky for 200 years--made her shiver with foreboding. Men like James would be the death of the Schools, and what remained of wisdom.

The proof lay before her. As they entered the shattered foyer, some of James’ soldiers were piling crates, boxes and bags full of books in the center of the floor, beneath the shattered dome and the clear, cloudless sky.

"It’s amazing how many books still hide in this world, "Eric said. "The ancients never tired of writing them. Wherever we go, we find them, especially in the abandoned cities."

Telira nodded, swallowing back her rage. There were hundreds of books stacked here, some charred or rotted beyond hope, others almost pristine, with only a deep ambering of their paper to belie their age. When they’d finished picking over the dead city for every hidden volume, she knew, James’ men would put them to the torch, to celebrate their victory and appease whatever tattooed, conqueror’s god they worshipped.

Her resolve hardened as Eric and Toshiro escorted her through dark, musty hallways, their feet silent on the rotten carpet. At the end of this maze they entered a large, torchlit chamber with intact walls and ceiling, relatively warm and dry. Guards stood everywhere, and at the far end of room, where the ancients had built a dais or stage, lay James, on a simple pallet of rolled canvas.

He was ill; she could see it from yards away. His eyes met hers as soon as she entered the room, alert but haggard and ringed with dark circles. Like his soldiers and his son, King James had eaten poorly in recent months. He was breathing just a little too rapidly and deeply. Her eye told her that he was a powerful, handsome man when in good health, with long limbs, fine features, and long gray hair gathered at either side of his head in braids. Like Toshiro, his tattoos extended to his cheeks and forehead, flowering over his eyes and beside his nose.

She felt Toshiro’s claw on her shoulder as they approached the dais; like the others, she knelt before the man she fully intended to murder.

"My Lord," Eric said with the curious formality that royal sons use to address royal fathers, "Toshiro and I have brought the Schooled physician."

James nodded, holding Telira in the grip of his sick, weary eyes.

"My name is Telira Lopez, my Lord. I was educated at the School of the Gulf, in Texarkansas."

He grunted. "We can talk about that later. Now, come up here, and see what you can do with this mess."

His tone was disarmingly familiar. Eric and Toshiro stood, keeping their place, and all eyes were on her as she ascended the dais.

"I’ll need more light," she said, and several torches were moved to illuminate her work.

James had stripped to a simple tunic. The arrow had entered from the side, sneaking between the plates of his armor to violate the anterior thigh, creating a deep puncture wound that had sealed itself with thrombus and intervening tissue, with a little help from a feeble attempt at battlefield cautery. The wound was angry--redness extended up to the King’s groin, and when she touched it, he winced, stifling a cry. She felt fluctuance beneath, the hint of a liquid mass buried deep in the tissue. James had pulses in his feet; the arrow had spared his blood vessels. And in three days, he had developed none of the symptoms of tetanus.

"Well?" he said, when she had finished.

"You have an abscess," she said, and hastily added, "Your Majesty. A collection of pus deep in the tissues. It must be drained to save your leg and your life."

"Drained?" Eric asked, approaching the dais, peering at her with a mix of dread and suspicion.

"I must cut into the wound, so the infection drains out of his body, rather than seeping into his blood." She reached into her bag, removing a bottle of raw grain alcohol, a roll of fine linen that contained her instruments, and the clay pipe. Lastly, she took out the vial of opium and the little bag of stywood.

Eric and Toshiro, unbidden, had ascended to the dais.

"You’d best know what you’re doing, Schooled," Toshiro said. "If the King dies, you die."

The King frowned. "That is no compunction to put on a healer," he snapped. "I will say who dies and who does not!"

Toshiro bowed his head.

The King looked at Telira. "I would appreciate your best work, young lady."

In his old, gray, peregrine eyes she saw the same pain, fear, hope and pleading that she saw in every other patient. King and conqueror had been reduced to supplicant.

She nodded, swallowing. She filled the pipe with opium and gave it to the King. As he smoked, she laid out her instruments, gleaming steel so beautiful and sharp, and formed into such odd, exquisite shapes, that Eric and Toshiro stared at them with wonder.

A sense of nonreality cloaked her head as she prepared the dose of stywood, as if her head were filled with cotton. In this dream, nothing existed but the wound, and the words reverberating in her brain.

King James, deep in trance from the opium, took the heaping spoon of bitter white poison under his tongue, and shortly his limbs grew flaccid, his eyes dull and sightless, his breathing so shallow as to be undetectable.

She cut deep, drained the foulness, and dressed the wound with clean, snow-white linen.

She stayed with him, and when he began to wake she excused herself, and went outside, to stand in the snow, under the stars, whispering the ancient Oath of Hippocrates, again and again.

* * *

Within a day, James had shrugged aside his fever. The wound stopped draining and became less tender. The King was boisterous and expansive. When she finished her exam on the second morning, she withdrew from the dais, and bowed. Eric stood with Toshiro and the rest of James’ staff, watching her, waiting to see what she would say.

"Your Majesty is doing well," she said, her tone flat and dry. "The threat is past. I’ll come back in a few days to check the wound."

The King raised his eyebrows. His pallet had been replaced by his throne, an ancient, massive chair of gleaming chrome and faded leather. His appearance was fitting for a man whose grip on the region had tightened, even in his illness. He wore half-armor over his battle tunic, and his helmet incorporated a crown of black, evil-looking spikes. He was a formidable presence. Looking at him, Telira knew Gutierrez had no hope of retrieving what James had taken.

"Where are you going?" the King asked.

"I have to return to my hospital."

Eric snickered. "Your hospital? That filthy, tattered tent?"

Telira turned on him. "That’s right."

Eric and Toshiro laughed. The King smiled at her, a ferocious expression.

"The Prince will Acquaint you with your new duties," he said.

Eric bowed to the man who was his father and his liege, and led a fuming, frightened Telira from the torchlit chamber. She felt the leers of Toshiro and the others follow them out.

"I’ll be happy to care for your men," she said, trying to think ahead. "But the civilians also need me."

"You can’t care for this population with your facilities," he said, as they entered the old foyer.

She barely heard him as her eyes took in the scene. A dozen men, older men who obviously were not warriors, their robes long and soft, their arms and temples and the sides of their neck almost black with tattoos, were picking books and old papers out of the pile in the center of the room, inspecting them, annotating them, cataloguing them, and packing them into crates.

"What are your doing?" she asked him.

"What does it look like?" he asked. His voice was gentle, almost whispered. He stood very close to her, and suddenly she was aware of him looking at her intently, the way men often looked at her.

She was silent for a moment, examining his face. "You’re not going to burn them?" she asked, when her mouth worked again.

He smiled, and it stretched the tattoos that climbed up his neck and over his jaw. "I don’t think my father would appreciate that," he said. "He doesn’t stock his libraries with ashes."

She stared at him, his meaning exploding in her mind. At the same instant, she recognized the pattern of his tattoos, and gasped. Without thinking, she reached out to touch his neck.

Guards appeared from nowhere, and only Eric’s sharp gesture stopped them from cutting her down.

She barely noticed the blur of abortive violence. As Eric’s guards fell back, glowering, she ran her hands over the tattoos that flowered his warm skin: beautifully interlocked, cursive letters, stylized almost beyond recognition, spelling out words that were difficult to read in their arabesque intertwining.

"The names of the books we have read are written in our flesh," he said, and clasped her hand where she was touching his neck.

He smiled at the expression on her face, turned, and stepped out into the sunlight. She followed.

His hand took her elbow in a warm, friendly grip. He pointed at a compact building about a hundred yards away, almost as intact as the one from which they had just emerged. Men were moving all over it, beginning the tasks of repair.

"The King has provided that place for you," said the Prince. "When it is ready, you will make your hospital there."

She stared at him.

"This building behind us will be a Library," he said, "once we have consolidated our position here and no longer require it as a military headquarters. My father hopes that, in the spring, you will escort me and my staff to Texarkansas, to your School."

"Why?"

"He wants to build one here."

They talked for a long time, then, of the many things to be done. Then he assigned four men to her, and gave her a horse and three precious bags of wheat. She returned to her ragged little hospital, where she discovered that Louis had handled things very well.

I will start with you, she told the young man silently. I will make you a healer, Louis. Tonight, if you are willing, you will take an oath, a very old oath, that protects healers from madness, and patients from healers. My first student, the first of many. Now we can build.

She fed her patients, changed their dressings, set their bones, instructed Louis in the use of stywood and opium and a dozen other drugs. When she had a moment’s spare time, she gazed in the direction of the old city, toward the past and the future, toward Eric, and thought of the life rising from those ashes.

Jonathon Sullivan MD is Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Wayne State University/Detroit Receiving Hospital. He is the recipient of an NIH research grant, to investigate molecular mechanisms of brain death after cardiac arrest. Dr. Sullivan lives in Farmington Hills, MI.