Grim

The Physician’s Daughter

Grim

“Hold still,” I said. “I know it hurts. Hold still anyway.”

The man, his name was Yosef, he’d told me twice, as if the name might help, had a forearm broken in two places where the stone had come down on it. I’d seen this before. My father had shown me how to set it before he showed me most other things, because broken arms were common and needed doing quickly before the swelling made it worse.

“My father was hurt like this,” I said, talking because people held still better when there was something to listen to. “He set it himself. Said it was the only time in his life he was glad to know what he knew.”

“Is he…” Yosef started, and then his breath went out of him as I worked the bone back to where it needed to be.

“He died three months ago,” I said. “His heart. He’d known for two years and hadn’t told me.” She finished the setting and began wrapping. “He thought I’d worry.”

“Would you have?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I would have worried while he was still alive to argue with, which is better.”

Yosef laughed, which was unexpected, and then caught himself. The movement had shifted the arm.

“Don’t,” I said. “Hold still.”

I tied off the wrapping. Outside the courtyard walls the sounds of the siege continued. I’d stopped hearing them the way I’d stopped hearing my own heartbeat, but they were always there, and occasionally something in them changed and my body registered the change before my mind did.

“Will it heal?” Yosef said.

“If you rest it and keep it clean and don’t do anything foolish with it for six weeks. Which in these circumstances,” She stopped. No point finishing the sentence. Both of them understood what the circumstances were.

“My name was Miriam,” I said. I didn’t know why I said it that way, with the was. “My father was a physician. He taught me by letting me be in the room when it happened, and when he died I kept working because no one else knew what I knew and the work didn’t stop.”

“You’re good at it,” Yosef said.

“I know,” I said. Not pride. Just true.

I was twenty-seven years old. I had been frightened most of the time since the siege began and exhausted all of the time and there were days I hated the people I was helping for needing so much help. I kept working because stopping felt worse than continuing.

The wall came down.

The sound arrived before the weight did, a low percussion moving through stone, and my body registered it before my mind understood it. I had time to turn my head. Not enough time.

Limestone dust filled the air before the stones arrived. The dust tasted of old walls and mortar and a thousand years of this city. I breathed it in. I was breathing it in when the first stone hit.

The weight arrived in sequence. The first stones took what they took. Then more. My body received them in the order they came. Between the first and the last I was aware of Yosef’s arm somewhere near me, the arm I’d just set, the six weeks he’d need if he rested it.

The circumstances didn’t allow.

The pain wasn’t what I’d trained myself to expect. In four months of working the rooms where pain was I’d categorized many of its gradations. What arrived was before pain, or perhaps pain had arrived and no capacity remained to receive it as pain.

Still light. Orange, sideways, afternoon light of Jerusalem in July coming through the gap where the wall had been. I’d worked in this courtyard for four months and I hadn’t looked at the light once. I looked at it now.

The sentence was still in my mouth. I didn’t know what it had been going to say.

I rose above the rubble. The courtyard was below me, the stones, the figures underneath them, Yosef’s arm at the wrong angle. I saw myself.

I had been frightened for four months. The frightened stopped first.

The light continued through the gap.

The light continued.

The flies find us within the first hour. Jerusalem in July has those flies, heavy, purposeful, experienced. I spent four months working around them in the rooms where the wounded were. I know exactly what they’re doing now.

Table of contents

Grim

• Hunter on the Ice
• The Watcher on the Hill
• The Heart
• The First Breath
• The Weight of Heaven
• The Field
• The Physician’s Daughter
• The Iron
• The Chariot
• The Decision
• The God King
• The Taiga
• The Silk Road
• The Conquistador
• The Viking Shore
• The Grass
• The Plague Cart
• The Hold
• The Gardener
• The Astronomer
• The Revolutionary
• The Factory Child
• The Mud
• The Number
• The Cartographer
• The Between
• The Cauldron
• The Unnamed
• The Stake
• The Comfort Woman
• The Fast One
• The Collector
• The Scientist
• The Minister
• The Administrator
• The Threshold
• The Climate
• The Upload
• The Station
• The Machine Mind
• The Door
• The Reunion
• The Voice
• The Watcher on the Threshold
• The Work