Secondhand Sorcery

The world was pain, and its very center was within her body. She could feel it with every breath, every beat of her heart: a burst of fire, a snarl of barbed wire in her midsection, so enormous she couldn’t even pin it down to a specific point. Loops of it ran down her leg and up across her gut and into her groin, pulsing, hot and angry. The rest of her hurt less, but it all hurt.

Outside her body there was a bed, or a couch—it seemed to change—and a room with a light, and an old man reading a book, and a rotating cast of men and women who came and looked and talked over her body. They poked her with sharp things, prodded at the snarl to hear her cry. Every detail changed; the room would have different furniture, or be a different color, and sometimes it was dark. Sometimes she would dream that she was moving, or the world was moving around her, while she lay flat and still. Cold nights and urgent voices. All dreams. The world was small, and it was pain.

Time passed, and the world was a couch in a little room with cluttered bookshelves and a desk in one corner. A man was there, talking to the old man while he sat in his chair, but she could only make out a few words, it was all Turkish. She tried to talk to the standing man, but he didn’t pay any attention to her. She tried again, and again, and eventually he looked at her, then leaned over her, and she fell asleep.

More time passed, but the room and the world were the same now, and she could think a little better. The old man was still in the chair, but sleeping, his head on the desk. His name—she was pretty sure—was Kemal. Hers was Nadia. The whole middle part of her body ached abominably, and there was a terrible smell in the air. A smell like a badly-cleaned public restroom, mixed with something else. Something rotten. She didn’t like to think what that meant.

When she was too tired of being alone and hurting to be considerate any longer, she cleared her throat loudly, then called Kemal by name until he lifted his head to look at her. His beard was longer now, and he looked tired. He smiled when he saw her looking at him, but the smile didn’t look very happy. The smile was as tired as he was.

“It is good that you are awake, and making sense,” he said. “They hoped that you would wake soon. You are getting antibiyotikler for the disease, but they are not done yet.”

“Disease? What disease?”

“The injury. Bullets are dirty, and you were hurt badly.”

“Were? I still am. Where are we?”

“The house of a friendly Kurd. They have been hiding you for more than a week now, in several different houses. This one is in Free Kurdistan; we should be safe here.”

“Free Kurdistan? Is that even a—oh, never mind, it doesn’t matter. Am I supposed to hurt this much?”

“There are medications they can give you, for pain,” he said. Something about the way he said it made her suspicious.

“I’d like that. But is it supposed to hurt this much?” She lifted her head and neck enough to look down at her lower body, and caught a glimpse of a mess of sheets and blankets. But the movement shifted something lower down, so that she hissed and fell back panting. “That! That is not normal! How am I supposed to walk? Or … or do anything else?”

“You will not be walking soon,” Kemal said, in a voice so quiet she could barely hear it.

“How long will it be like this?”

Kemal shut his eyes. “I do not know. They do not know. What I know, I will tell you, and what I know is this: you were shot in the hip. You know this? You remember?”

“Yes, of course.”

“It was a rifle shot. A powerful rifle, military. The bullet passed through, damaging many muscles, some bone, and also there seems to be some injury to … your female parts.”

“Seems to be? Seems to? How do we not know, after a week?”

“You were in a hospital for less than three hours. No time for taramaları, the look inside the body. Or for ameliyat, to fix, to put together again. We have been hiding in houses this past week, with doctors and nurses visiting with what they can bring home. Drugs, small things.”

“But I need surgery. Don’t I?”

“You need many things. You should have had surgery long ago. Your muscles, something is wrong. Many things are wrong. I am not a doctor, I do not know what the things are. They try to explain, and I do not want to listen. They say they have a doctor who is willing to help, in secret. But no hospital. He would clean the table where they eat dinner, and work on you there. It would not be as good.”

Nadia felt suddenly lightheaded. Surgery on a table, sheets for dressings, and she smelled like old garbage. She did not need to be a doctor to know this was bad. Very bad. It could kill her, and she would die on a couch in some house in the middle of nowhere. Unless … “Ruslan. Do you know where my brother Ruslan is? He could heal this. He can heal anything but death itself. This would be simple for him.”

“We hear stories. There are still jinn at work in Anatolia. Where Turkey used to be. Now it is Turkey no more—only the land of this general, that big man, Kurds here, Armenians there, towns that say they are countries. These Kurds, they know you stopped the murder of their brothers. They are grateful. But they are not strong, and they must be secret. They cannot tell anyone where you are, and your brother, if he is in Turkey still, he must be secret too. How can we bring him to you?”

“I don’t know. But this, this is … what am I supposed to do?”

“Now? I cannot answer that question. I am sorry.” He looked wretched, and probably felt it, if he’d been stuck with her for a week. But he at least could still walk!

“Why don’t you leave, then?”

His brow wrinkled. “What do you mean? I cannot leave you. You are hurt.”

“And what can you do about it? What can anybody do about it? Nothing, it sounds like. So why don’t you just go home, to your daughter and her baby? You aren’t going to do any good for me here. You’ve done enough. You can leave, and get on with your life. I’m going to die anyway.”

“We do not know that.”

“No, ‘we’ don’t, but I am not stupid, and if I am not dead I will be a cripple lying in her own filth until her own rotting body kills her, so it doesn’t matter. What am I going to do, have Ézarine carry me everywhere?”

“Your jinniyah has done enough harm already—“

“She’s not a ‘jinniyah,’ damn you, she’s just a lump of ectoplasm! But she still saved your life, when you had to go and give us away at the bridge. She did more than you.”

“I did not want to go on the bridge to begin with, if you remember.”

“You didn’t want to do anything. It was your idea to come to this horrible place, you hung back when there was murder going on, and you nearly got us murdered when we went to seek justice. I should have stayed by myself. You’ve done nothing but get in the way, and now I’m going to die. Because of you.”

He stood up at once, his shoulders rigid, and Nadia felt very small all of a sudden. It came to her that, if he felt like hitting her, or just putting a pillow over her face, she would have no very good reason to fight back. But all he said was, “I will get you more pain medicine.” Then he left the room, closing the door a little too hard behind him without quite slamming it.

She had not been kind, or fair, or spoken the truth. She knew that. It hardly mattered. She had tried to do right, tried to win justice for the people of Panos, and now she was going to die in a horrible way because of it. What was the point of trying to be right in the first place, then?

A memory came to her, of icons on a wall. Where were they now? Stuffed in an evidence locker somewhere, most likely. And she had nothing to say to them either. She had sought out her penance with sincerity, and this—this mockery—was what she got back. A broken body and a slow death.

Her throat was tight, and she cried, because it was a thing she could do that was not simply lying there. She cried a long time, her shaking shoulders sending little quivers of pain down to her hip, and nobody came in to see her or offer her comfort, and when she was done the only difference was that her face was wet and she was a little out of breath. And the middle of her body was still a leaden throbbing mass of pain.

Was there hope, any hope at all? Maybe. Ruslan was still out there, if nobody had killed him. And the surgery might work after all. She might be able to walk a little, in time, assuming the authorities did not hunt her down and kill her while she was still in recovery. But … to get her hopes up would feel almost degrading. Naive, like a child. Wasn’t it better to face the world as it was?

Yes. This was it. She was crippled, and would stay crippled for the future as far as she could predict it, and she might die, and that was that. She lifted an arm to look at it, saw where they had put in little plastic things, like embedded needles taped on, to put drugs in her. Drugs, and maybe water. She was not thirsty, but she was … no, not hungry either, she did not feel like eating, but her stomach was empty. She could tell it had been some time since she ate. Her arms looked thin to her, but it might have been her imagination.

Kemal was not coming back with the pain medicine. She could not blame him, even if she did want the drugs. She wondered if that was a good sign, if she should be wanting the painkillers, or if on top of everything else these Kurds had made her into a drug addict. It probably wouldn’t make any difference if she died an addict, though.

It was very tedious, not being able to move, or do anything but lie on a couch feeling uncomfortable. She could not even squirm, or get to a new position, because squirming hurt too. She looked over at the books on the shelf, and saw that the titles on the spines were all in Turkish, and none of them very interesting. Whoever lived here liked botany an awful lot. She kept looking over the titles anyway, for a distraction, and didn’t realize she had fallen asleep again until a voice woke her up.

“Kto eto skazal?” she said without thinking, rubbing at her eyes. She didn’t see anyone in the room—was there a TV, or a radio, buried in the clutter somewhere? Blast it, now she hurt again.

“I said,” a familiar male voice repeated, she couldn’t tell from where, “’all is well, child, and all will be well, now and forever, to the end of the world.’”

So. After he got her in trouble with Titus, after almost a month out of contact, after Nadia had been running for her life from so many different people she literally wasn’t sure she could name them all, when all was lost, the vermin finally decided to show up again. She was almost surprised that she didn’t feel more surprised. It was in the bug’s usual way, to show up when he was least helpful.

“But I am not well, Beelzebub. I am not well at all. Did your intelligence sources not tell you that much, or are you just blind? Can you smell? Do you smell that? And where are you?”

“Up here,” he answered, and a slight motion led her eyes to a dull grey fly wiggling its wings at the top corner of a bookcase. “Out of swatting range. And no, I can’t smell in this form. Audio-visual only. A design oversight I’ve often regretted.”

“You are fortunate, then. Doubly fortunate; I can’t get up to crush you. You might as well come closer, so you can see how pathetic I am. Or better yet, go away. You were not invited.”

“You weren’t in any shape to invite me,” the fly answered, obediently crawling a little lower. “I had to invite myself. I’ve been coming over the last three days, and this is the first time I’ve found you able to wake up. They’ve had you on a lot of drugs.”

“Yes, I know, and they’re not good enough. If you have a point, get to it. I am going to die, and it is all your fault. If you had left me alone, I would be in Thessaloniki now, with my family, and able to walk.”

“I don’t deny that some of this is my fault. But not all of it. And things have changed now. With Titus Marshall out of the way, I have much more liberty to give you assistance. What’s wrong? How injured are you?”

“I don’t even know. I was shot. Shot in the hip. Something broke, and I can’t move, and it hurts. I can’t tell you more than that, because I’ve been half-dead for a week, and there’s no good doctors in this horrible place, and I’m going to die!” She wiped her tears away with the back of her arm; to have Beelzebub see her so low was just one more humiliation. “Do you have magic healing powers, little bug?”

“No. But I could arrange better medical care.”

“From who? The Turks? They’re trying to kill me!”

“One person from one part of the Turkish army tried to kill you. Apparently. We still don’t know what happened last Monday. But I’m not a Turk. I represent the United States of America, and my commanding officer has authorized your evacuation to the nearest medical facility under our control.”

“You can fix this?” The promise seemed suspicious. It was too easy.

“I don’t know what your exact problem is, Natasha. But I’m confident that we can provide better medical care than you’re getting here, on a couch, in a house in separatist Turkish Kurdistan.”

Before replying, she closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths, and pulled up her wall. She didn’t know what exactly Beelzebub could do. “And what would the price of this help be?”

“We’re not expecting you to pay us back—“

“Don’t treat me like an idiot child. Getting me out costs money. Surgery costs money. And governments are not in the business of charity for people like me. There must be a lot of sick girls in this country who need treatment; are you offering this to them too?”

“I know we’re providing what help we can, though it’s not enough to match need. But this is a specifically military operation, and you’d be treated at a secure military healthcare facility. You’re right that we’re interested in you because of Ézarine. That’s obvious. But we have no way of compelling you to do anything. That should also be obvious. You should think of this as a goodwill gesture—and also a kind of apology. Like you said, it is partly my—and the American government’s—fault that this has happened to you.”

“So you’re doing this out of, what, altruism? Armies aren’t run by humanitarians.”

“You’d be surprised. But no. We’re doing this, or at least I believe my boss is authorizing this, because your situation is an embarrassment. Governments don’t like to be embarrassed. And, yes, we’re hoping you can be persuaded to cooperate with us, or at least … stop participating in the war in such a destabilizing way. But like I said, we can’t force you to do anything, and we respect that.”

“If I hadn’t ‘participated’ a week ago, and been so ‘destabilizing,’ many more people would be dead now. How many lives did you save while you were chasing me around the country?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“No, it’s even simpler. Your government is embarrassed, you say. I am an embarrassment, and dangerous too. You are trying to bring me in so you can get rid of me, aren’t you?”

“That doesn’t even make sense. I could have killed you in your sleep two days ago, easily, at no risk. My superior was strongly inclined to order me to do so. I had to go out on a limb to get this much. I’m trying to help you, Natasha, but I can’t help without your cooperation.”

“Oh, so now you are threatening me? This conversation is over.” With the wall already up, it was a simple matter to call Ézarine, and the annoying little bug disappeared. She dismissed the familiar right away; the situation was frustrating enough without her.

In a way, she was grateful that the Lord of the Flies had finally decided to show himself again. It clarified things. Now she could see the choice laid before her for what it was: an easy retreat to renewed bondage in good health under the same monsters who had been using her before—Titus had only ever been a middleman—or the hard and dangerous route of being true to herself and her calling. It was only a test. She had been tested before, and prevailed. Beelzebub had spoken the truth by accident: all would be well. There was no reason to be afraid anymore.

She had just decided as much when Kemal hurried back into the room. “I am sorry,” he panted, “we had used all our pain medicine already. More is coming. Why did you call your jinniyah?”

Nadia considered making something up, decided against it. “My old friend Beelzebub tried to make me an offer. I refused him.”

Kemal blanched. “He knows where we are?”

“For the past three days, he says. You let me worry about him. Ézarine is stronger than any of his little vermin. Will the doctor be ready to fix me soon?”

The old man still looked worried, but said, “First we must know what is wrong. The owner of this house is a doctor—a foot doctor, not one who can help you—and he thinks he can get you into his clinic after hours to look inside you. If what he sees is good, maybe we can do the same thing at the hospital to fix you.”

She smiled, and the smile was a little bit genuine. “That would be wonderful. Thank you for all your help, Mister Kemal. I’m sorry for snapping at you earlier. You’re doing your best, and I owe you so much.”

“I know. These are trying times, child. God will see us through.”

Her smile got bigger, and more real. “Yes. Yes, he will.”