Free Limbo's Child by Jonah Hewitt Page B

feet of the person dying here, and the shadow of a body breathing very shallowly. There was something profoundly different from this room than all the others however; the patient was alone.
    Moríro walked around the curtain and regarded the unconscious person. She was pale and ancient looking, but not yet forty. Her face was bloated and puffy but hid fine features. Her hair and eyebrows were gone, her skin paper thin and sallow. He had seen this many times. The medicine of this age was often effective, but it just as often ravaged the body and left it an empty shell. This woman was at the end of a very long intervention, but it had ultimately failed, and the results were far from pretty.
    He reached for the chart that hung from the end of the bed, but as he touched it his senses told him far more than the chart and diagrams could ever tell him. Amanda Tipping, only thirty-seven, dying of advanced breast cancer. It had spread throughout her body, and the strongest of this age’s poisons could not kill her cancer before it killed her. Yet, for some reason, she had not given up; she had chosen every available option, clinging desperately to life. Even now the only thing that prevented her from demanding one more round of possible treatments was her near unconsciousness.
    And suddenly Moríro understood. She was alone. There was no one to hold her hand, no family, no loved ones, no one for her to tell to be courageous and strong for her sake. There was no one for her, and she only had herself, so she had fought to the bitter end, for there was nothing else left for her. Once she had fallen into silence, the doctors and nurses had gone and left the watching to the machines. Seeing her now, Moríro knew that he could count each remaining, labored breath and that there would not be more than a few hundred at most. She was very near the end. Moríro had found his vessel, if she were willing.
    All the colors of the room were beige or pale green, and all the angles were sharp or mechanical. There was nothing warm or comforting. A dying person deserved a comfortable bed and a thick blanket, but here the sheets and blankets were thin and the bed had railings more appropriate to a pig’s pen. The warm and dim candles of past ages could imbue even a room like this with some quiet dignity at the last moments of life, but the glaring, horrid lights of this age threw everything into pallid clarity. Looking at her nearly dead body, Moríro felt something he had not felt in a very long time. He felt pity.
    Motivated by a rare native upswelling of compassion, Moríro’s indecisiveness fled, and he decided to not merely act the part of a doctor, but to be a doctor truly, something he had not done in decades. He shut the door and shoved back the thin curtain. He took off the ridiculous white lab coat and laid it on an errant chair. Doctors used to have a sense of propriety and wear the customary black afforded their station. They had surrendered the authority of black for the sterility of white and he did not like it at all. If he was going to doctor now, he was going to do it properly.
    He rummaged around inside his olive army coat. The coat was warm and heavy, but mostly he favored it because it had many interior pockets. From one of these, he took out a worn leather satchel. He took off the overcoat and laid it on top of the lab coat. He opened the leather case gingerly and began placing the items inside carefully at the foot of the woman’s bed. A set of small, slender, silver spatulas, a miniature apothecary’s mortar and pestle, folded papers of dried herbs and powders, tiny vials of lead, glass and silver. From one, he used a spatula to remove a dark purple dust that was all that was left from a potent, dried flower, the Amaranth, the undying flower, used by both Greeks and Aztecs.
    He carefully measured it out and placed it in the mortar with a drop of a milky essential oil, silphion, taken from a plant only found in the Atlas